essay about dirty politics

Essay on Dirty Politics

Students are often asked to write an essay on Dirty Politics in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Dirty Politics

Introduction.

Dirty politics refers to unethical practices in the political arena. It involves deception, manipulation, and corruption to gain power and control.

Characteristics of Dirty Politics

Leaders engaged in dirty politics often misuse their authority. They break laws, bend rules, and spread false information for their benefit.

Effects of Dirty Politics

Dirty politics can harm society. It leads to mistrust, social unrest, and economic instability. It discourages honest individuals from participating in politics.

To build a better society, we must reject dirty politics. We should promote honesty, transparency, and fairness in our political systems.

250 Words Essay on Dirty Politics

The concept of dirty politics, manifestations of dirty politics.

Dirty politics can manifest in various forms such as corruption, nepotism, and character assassination. Corruption, the most prevalent form, involves the misuse of public office for personal gain. Nepotism, another form, involves favoring family or friends in political appointments or contracts. Character assassination involves damaging an opponent’s reputation with false accusations to gain a competitive advantage.

Implications of Dirty Politics

The implications of dirty politics are far-reaching. It breeds public distrust in government, hampers socioeconomic development, and can lead to political instability. The erosion of public trust can deter citizens from participating in the democratic process, thereby threatening the very essence of democracy.

Combating Dirty Politics

To combat dirty politics, greater transparency in government operations is crucial. Implementing stringent anti-corruption measures, promoting a culture of accountability, and encouraging active citizen participation in governance can help curb these unethical practices.

In conclusion, dirty politics, with its detrimental effects on society, needs to be addressed urgently. It requires collective efforts from governments, civil society, and citizens to restore integrity in politics. Only then can we hope to build a political landscape that truly serves the public interest, rather than the interests of a select few.

500 Words Essay on Dirty Politics

The landscape of dirty politics.

Politics, in its purest form, is a noble pursuit. It’s the mechanism through which societies make collective decisions, allocate resources, and navigate the complexities of governance. However, when marred by unscrupulous practices, it devolves into what is commonly referred to as ‘dirty politics’. This term encapsulates actions that are unethical, dishonest, or manipulative, often employed to gain or maintain power.

Propaganda is another tool of dirty politics. By manipulating information, politicians can sway public opinion to serve their interests. This can involve spreading misinformation, creating false narratives, or exploiting emotional appeals. The advent of social media has amplified the reach and impact of propaganda, making it a potent weapon in the arsenal of dirty politics.

Consequences of Dirty Politics

The repercussions of dirty politics are far-reaching and detrimental. They erode public trust in political institutions, leading to cynicism and apathy among citizens. This can result in lower voter turnout and a disengaged populace, both of which undermine the very essence of democracy.

Despite the grim picture, there are ways to combat dirty politics. Transparency and accountability are key. Politicians must be held accountable for their actions, and the processes of governance should be transparent to the public. This can be achieved through robust legal frameworks, independent oversight bodies, and a free and responsible press.

Education also plays a critical role. An informed citizenry is less likely to fall prey to the machinations of dirty politics. Therefore, fostering media literacy and critical thinking skills is essential.

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Essay on Politics for Students and Children

500+ words essay on politics.

When we hear the term politics, we usually think of the government, politicians and political parties. For a country to have an organized government and work as per specific guidelines, we require a certain organization. This is where politics comes in, as it essentially forms the government. Every country, group and organization use politics to instrument various ways to organize their events, prospects and more.

Politics does not limit to those in power in the government. It is also about the ones who are in the run to achieve the same power. The candidates of the opposition party question the party on power during political debates . They intend to inform people and make them aware of their agenda and what the present government is doing. All this is done with the help of politics only.

Dirty Politics

Dirty politics refers to the kind of politics in which moves are made for the personal interest of a person or party. It ignores the overall development of a nation and hurts the essence of the country. If we look at it closely, there are various constituents of dirty politics.

The ministers of various political parties, in order to defame the opposition, spread fake news and give provocative speeches against them. This hampers with the harmony of the country and also degrades the essence of politics . They pass sexist remarks and instill hate in the hearts of people to watch their party win with a majority of seats.

Read 500 Words Essay on Corruption Here

Furthermore, the majority of politicians are corrupt. They abuse their power to advance their personal interests rather than that of the country. We see the news flooded with articles like ministers and their families involving in scams and illegal practices. The power they have makes them feel invincible which is why they get away with any crime.

Before coming into power, the government makes numerous promises to the public. They influence and manipulate them into thinking all their promises will be fulfilled. However, as soon as they gain power, they turn their back on the public. They work for their selfish motives and keep fooling people in every election. Out of all this, only the common suffers at the hands of lying and corrupt politicians.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Lack of Educated Ministers

If we look at the scenario of Indian elections, any random person with enough power and money can contest the elections. They just need to be a citizen of the country and be at least 25 years old. There are a few clauses too which are very easy.

The strangest thing is that contesting for elections does not require any minimum education qualification. Thus, we see how so many uneducated and non-deserving candidates get into power and then misuse it endlessly. A country with uneducated ministers cannot develop or even be on the right path.

We need educated ministers badly in the government. They are the ones who can make the country progress as they will handle things better than the illiterate ones. The candidates must be well-qualified in order to take on a big responsibility as running an entire nation. In short, we need to save our country from corrupt and uneducated politicians who are no less than parasites eating away the development growth of the country and its resources. All of us must unite to break the wheel and work for the prosperous future of our country.

FAQs on Politics

Q.1 Why is the political system corrupt?

A.1 Political system is corrupt because the ministers in power exercise their authority to get away with all their crimes. They bribe everyone into working for their selfish motives making the whole system corrupt.

Q.2 Why does India need educated ministers?

A.2 India does not have a minimum educational qualification requirement for ministers. This is why the uneducated lot is corrupting the system and pushing the country to doom. We need educated ministers so they can help the country develop with their progressive thinking.

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Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

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Annie Lambert

specializes in creating authoritative content on marketing, business, and finance, with a versatile ability to handle any essay type and dissertations. With a Master’s degree in Business Administration and a passion for social issues, her writing not only educates but also inspires action. On EssayPro blog, Annie delivers detailed guides and thought-provoking discussions on pressing economic and social topics. When not writing, she’s a guest speaker at various business seminars.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

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The Problem of Dirty Hands

Should political leaders violate the deepest constraints of morality in order to achieve great goods or avoid disasters for their communities? This question poses what has become known amongst philosophers as the problem of dirty hands. There are many different strands to the philosophical debate about this topic, and they echo many of the complexities in more popular thinking about politics and morality. All, however, involve the idea that correct political action must sometimes conflict with profound moral norms. This entry seeks to unravel these strands and clarify the central normative issues about politics that the cry of ‘dirty hands’ evokes. Beginning with an illustrative passage from a renowned 19 th century English novel, the essay traces the dirty hands tradition back to Machiavelli, though its present vogue is owed mostly to the writings of the distinguished American political theorist, Michael Walzer. Walzer’s views are explored in the light of earlier theorists such as Machiavelli and Max Weber and certain vacillations in his intellectual posture are briefly discussed. This leads to the posing of five issues with which the entry is principally concerned. First, is the dirty hands problem simply confused and its formulation the merest contradiction? Second, does the overriding of moral constraints take place within morality or somehow beyond it? Third, can the cry of dirty hands be restricted wholly or principally to politics or does it speak equally to other areas of life, and, where politics is concerned, do only the principal agents get dirty hands or do their citizens share in the taint? This is the problem of scope. Fourth, how are the circumstances that call for dirty hands best described? Fifth, the dirty hands problem has affinities with the problem raised by moral dilemmas, but the question is: should those similarities be allowed to obscure significant differences?

In the course of addressing these issues, the dirty hands challenge is also distinguished from that of political realism, with which it has some affinities, and the resort to role morality to render dirty hands coherent is discussed, as is the issue of the desirability of shaming or punishing dirty hands agents. The relevance of “threshold deontology” is explored, and it is suggested that much of the point of invoking dirty hands comes from an ambiguous attitude to absolute moral prohibitions, combining a rejection of them with a certain wistful attachment to their flavour.

1. Introduction

2. shifting interpretations, 3. a conceptual confusion, 4. a conflict within morality, 5. the scope of dirty hands and some significant distinctions, 6. the dirty hands of citizens, 7. the issue of absolutism, other internet resources, related entries.

Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Way We Live Now , is a biting critique of the corruption of late Victorian morals. One of its central characters, the shallow Lady Carbury, at one point voices her conviction that the praiseworthy deeds of the powerful escape the normal categories of morality. Commenting on the character of the novel’s dominant figure, the grand swindler Melmotte, she says to her journalist friend Mr. Booker:

“If a thing can be made great and beneficent, a boon to humanity, simply by creating a belief in it, does not a man become a benefactor to his race by creating that belief?” “At the expense of veracity?” suggested Mr. Booker. “At the expense of anything?” rejoined Lady Carbury with energy. “One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule.” “You would do evil to produce good?” asked Mr. Booker. “I do not call it doing evil….You tell me this man may perhaps ruin hundreds, but then again he may create a new world in which millions will be rich and happy.” “You are an excellent casuist, Lady Carbury.” “I am an enthusiastic lover of beneficent audacity,” said Lady Carbury…

Contemporary moral and political philosophy suffers from no lack of enthusiastic admirers of “beneficent audacity”. At one end of a spectrum are those consequentialists who are so captivated by the prospect of the new world of “happy millions” that they think it obscurantist to object to any evil means needed to achieve it—indeed, they agree with Lady Carbury in not calling such means evil. At the other end of that spectrum, stand the rather more reluctant advocates of “dirty hands” who think that some very good ends, such as the aversion of catastrophe, require the doing of evil, but unlike Lady Carbury, they insist on calling it evil, though necessary evil. And like Lady Carbury, they rather think that the agents who so dirty their hands cannot be measured “by the ordinary rule.” Even so, like W.H. Auden in his poem “Spain”, they think such agents doing what current circumstances make “necessary” should accept the guilt that their immoral actions earn. As Auden puts it:

“To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.”

The dirty hands tradition dates back to Machiavelli, though its present currency is largely owed to the American political theorist Michael Walzer who gave it the title of dirty hands in an influential article “Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands”, in which he coined the term “dirty hands” adapting it from Jean Paul Sartre’s play of the same name (Walzer 1973). Later, Walzer used the idea, though not the term, in his book Just and Unjust Wars (1977) in which he argued that an appeal to “supreme emergency” could not only explain but justify the Allied terror bombing of German cities in the early stages of World War II (Walzer 1977a, 267–68). For these early stages, roughly (it seems, for Walzer gives no date) up to the end of 1941, the deliberate massacre of thousands of German non-combatants was required by supreme emergency, even though it was gravely immoral. The prospect and likelihood of a Nazi victory were so dire for the lives and communal values of those facing defeat that the price of severe immorality was worth paying. In the subsequent conduct of the war, Walzer argued, the city bombings were simply immoral (as were the city bombings of Japan, including the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and could not be justified by supreme emergency. [ 1 ] When Walzer later revisited the topic of supreme emergency, he made it clear that it was a case of dirty hands, indeed he seems to have come to the view that only something like the circumstances of supreme emergency could provide a dirty hands justification. So he says, in the later discussion of supreme emergency, that the doctrine of dirty hands is that “according to which political and military leaders may sometimes find themselves in situations where they cannot avoid acting immorally, even when that means deliberately killing the innocent.” And again: “…dirty hands aren’t permissible (or necessary) when anything less than the ongoingness of the community is at stake, or when the danger that we face is anything less than communal death” (Walzer 2004a, 46).

The first thing to notice about this is that the identification of supreme emergency and dirty hands represents a dramatic shift from Walzer’s view in his original article, and this shift reflects a significant ambiguity in the dirty hands tradition. Walzer’s accounts of supreme emergency vary somewhat in the treatments in Just and Unjust Wars and in the later article, “Emergency Ethics” (and we shall attend to this later) but in both accounts the necessity to override deep moral constraints only arises in conditions approaching catastrophe. In the original 1973 paper, however, the trigger for dirty hands is nowhere near as extreme. One example there, with intriguing contemporary relevance, concerned a political leader’s need to torture a suspected terrorist in the hope of preventing the likely killing of hundreds of innocent people. This falls well short of the criterion of supreme emergency in Walzer’s later writings where the trigger is the devastation of whole peoples and/or their ways of life. Moreover, Walzer’s other example in the original paper was of a good democratic politician bribing a corrupt ward boss to deliver him votes with the promise of improperly delivered school construction contracts. Here not only is the moral violation much less profound than in the former case, but the emergency could hardly be considered “supreme” in any sense even if we allow that the votes are needed to win an important election and that the politician is genuinely motivated to do good when elected. In Walzer’s initial treatment, there is also some ambiguity in the use of the term “dirty hands” since he sometimes uses it for any conspicuous immorality as well as the more interesting and technical sense we are concerned with. So he says “It is easy to get one’s hands dirty in politics and it is often right to do so” (Walzer 1973, 174). The first clause seems to point to the widespread temptation to resort to immorality where the second indicates that it isn’t always right to do so, hence demarcating a positive normative sense of “dirty” from a merely descriptive sense. The use of “often” shows the more concessive attitude to the scope of dirty hands in contrast to Walzer’s later view.

Earlier writers concerned with the need for politicians to dirty their hands with immoral behaviour show some of this vacillation, sometimes stressing the extreme stakes that are involved, but more often appearing to view the political process generally as above morality, or at least operating with a different morality. (“One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule”). John M. Parrish in an interesting and far-ranging book (Parrish, 2007) shows that there are elements of the concern about the generally challenging nature of politics for morality as early as Plato’s Republic . Parrish’s understanding, however, of what constitutes dirty hands is often so broad as to obscure some of the distinctions, ambiguities and problems arising from current philosophical discussions. to be fair, he is interested in charting a sort of pre-history to the contemporary debate, and admits that “the problem may have changed over time” so that there is “a succession of dirty hands problems” (Parrish, p. 18). Even so, some of the apparently morally troubling examples he discusses from ancient intellectual sources have none of the marks of the contemporary problem. Augustine’s insistence, for example, that even a justly waged war is morally regrettable is accompanied by the untroubled argument that the warrior whose cause and intention is just does not sin at all (i.e., violate any moral obligation) in killing his enemy. Parrish’ emphasis on the idea that political life is pervasively morally problematic, however, does find echoes in early modern treatments that foreshadow the contemporary dirty hands discussion. One such influential treatment is that of Machiavelli. So Machiavelli thinks that the ordinary processes of politics require that the Prince “must learn how not to be good”, though he should maintain the appearance of virtue and indeed behave virtuously when the cost is low (Machiavelli 1513, 52). Max Weber stresses the way that regard for consequences must dominate the thinking of the politician as contrasted with ordinary or religiously inspired ethics. This contrast lies behind the opposition Weber discerns in “Politics as Vocation” between “an ethic of responsibility” and “an ethic of ultimate ends”. Although the terms in which Weber frames the contrast tend to confuse rather than clarify the issues, it is probable that one thing he has in mind for the “ultimate ends” side of the conflict is an ethic involving absolute prohibitions; he sees these as being in tension with an outlook geared to counting consequences. As Weber puts it: “there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends-that is, in religious terms, ‘the Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’-and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action” (Weber 1919, 120). The starkness of this contrast is one source of confusion since, as we shall see later, absolutists are not totally indifferent to consequences — not all their ethic consists of absolute prohibitions-and non-absolutists need not be obsessed only with consequences. But Weber is adamant that it is impossible in politics to adhere generally to any absolutist ethic of ultimate ends, largely because of what he sees as the central role of violence in politics. In spite of Walzer citing him approvingly (up to a point) in his original article, Weber does not seem to hold anything like Walzer’s mature view. He does not think that an ethic of ultimate ends suffices most of the time, but gives way in conditions of supreme emergency; rather his view appears to be that the ultimate ends ethic is quite generally inadequate to politics. In fact, Weber’s belief that violence is central to the operation of politics is exaggerated, though understandable in the circumstances in which he wrote, but if it were true it might give his position more affinity with Walzer’s idea of supreme emergency. The difference would remain that, although violence may well be a factor in establishing supreme emergency, Walzer’s mature understanding of supreme emergency requires more than simply incursions of violence.

This ambiguity about the extent of the need for dirty hands is reflected in much of the literature on the topic. Numerous writers have followed early Walzer (and some elements in both Machiavelli’s and Weber’s treatment of political morality) in regarding politics as a zone in which, to quote Neil Levy, “dirty actions are part and parcel of ordinary political life”. Levy adds: “Politicians must make deals, compromise with interests they abhor, distribute favours and neglect relationships” (Levy 2007, 52–3, endnote 26). A number of these things are no doubt regrettable or distasteful in varying degrees, but whether they are immoral depends on what the deals are, what the favours involve, how deep the compromise runs, and how damaging the neglect is (and to what sort of relationship). Much of what various writers regard as the need for dirty hands in politics is dubiously an issue of immorality at all. In order to maintain power and get important work done, a politician may have to appoint a member of a party in coalition with his own to an important Ministry ahead of a trusted colleague in his own party who has better credentials for the job. This is disappointing and painful to him and his colleague and clearly less than ideal (even though the appointee is, we may suppose, competent enough) but I do not think the act can be seen as immoral. To call it morally disagreeable is to signal the fact that certain valuable relations and ends are put under strain by it, but it is clearly not is the same league as torture, murder, or gross deceit.

Bernard Williams does indeed distinguish levels of gravity in the sinning required of politicians in his exploration of the scope of dirty hands, but he also suggests that the politician’s necessary immoralities are very common and distinctive. He distinguishes between the morally “disagreeable or distasteful” and the morally criminal, the latter being subsumed under a broad category of what he calls “violence” (Williams 1978, 71). Although Williams allows that some political actions that are popularly believed to be morally dubious, may well be morally acceptable when circumstances are properly understood, he casts a pretty wide net for the morally disagreeable. It involves such things as “lying, or at least concealment and the making of misleading statements; breaking promises; special pleading; temporary coalition with the distasteful; sacrifice of the interests of worthy persons to those of unworthy persons; and (at least if in a sufficiently important position) coercion up to blackmail” (Williams 1978, 59). Yet it is unlikely that all of these, as so generally described, are morally wrong in all circumstances. True, some philosophers have held as much for some of these—Augustine, Aquinas and Kant for lying, and Kant for promising—but surely lying is acceptable in extreme circumstances such as the need to protect an innocent person from a murderer, and even coercion (depending on the definition) isn’t always morally wrong, witness the coercive detention of people reasonably suspected of contagious disease that they are unaware of. It seems that most, if not all the things Williams mentions are in the category “normally morally wrong but morally permissible in certain circumstances”. Even blackmail might be in this category since blackmailing a vicious criminal in order to secure the freedom of his victim might (perhaps depending on the kind of blackmail) be morally permissible. Notions like regret or remorse are sometimes invoked to show that what had to be done was nonetheless immoral, but apart from the fact that an act such as the blackmail of a vicious criminal need not even be regrettable, there are many things one can rightly regret having to do that are not immoral, for example, punishing a child by withdrawing privileges. Remorse strikes a stronger, more moralised note, but for that very reason one should be careful not to confuse it with various feelings of discomfort, regret or sorrow for having to do certain things. Further investigation of the nature and appropriate conditions for remorse is interesting and difficult, but beyond the scope of this discussion, and its role as a criterion of dirty hands seems at best inconclusive.

The idea that dirty hands (in contrast to sheer bad behaviour and corrupt activity) are commonplace in politics is highly dubious, but just how extensive the reach of this phenomenon is in politics is difficult to determine, and would be best considered on a case by case, or perhaps category by category, fashion. Clearly, the most obvious, and I think the most interesting category is that described by Williams with the term “violence” (though that has the contentious, and I think unfortunate implication that all violence is immoral). This covers the acts that Walzer’s later argument seeks to capture with his term “supreme emergency”. His terminology and his later practice make the scope of dirty hands pretty restricted, perhaps more so than Williams intended, but I will follow his example and focus on really grave injustices like murder, torture, rape or slavery that are said to be warranted in conditions of extreme emergency.

First, however, it is worth noting that enthusiasm to detect the sway of dirty hands can lead to misdescription of some complex, disturbing moral situations. An interesting example of this has been explored by Jennifer Rubenstein in connection with problems facing International NGOs providing aid in emergency situations such as the refugee camps in the Congo. INGO agents have found that their provision of food and medicine is often exploited by warring factions within refugee camps and elsewhere (see also some of Fiona Terry’s discussion and examples in Terry 2002). This confronts them with often agonising decisions about whether to cease aid and leave the areas of distress because of the harm this exploitation generates, including continuation of violent conflict. If they leave they abandon suffering people, but if they stay, then they contribute unintentionally to great harms that others inflict on innocent people. Such problems are often described with the vocabulary of “dirty hands”, but, as Rubenstein argues, this description is misplaced since, for one thing, the aid agencies do not themselves intentionally do harm to avoid some great evil or achieve some great good. Rubenstein proposes a category of “spattered hands” to describe these situations in order to emphasise that the soiling is contributed by the actions of others (Rubenstein 2014, Chapter 4). We cannot examine the adequacy of her new category here, but she seems right that the examples are misdescribed as dirty hands.

It will be apparent from all this that the dirty hands problem needs initially some conceptual clarification; this should proceed with a view to five issues. First, there is the question whether the dirty hands scenario makes any sense at all; perhaps it is just a muddle. Second, there is the related question whether the overriding that dirty hands involve (or purport to involve) takes place within morality or somehow beyond it. Third, there is the question whether dirty hands are necessitated only or primarily by politics. Fourth, how are the circumstances that call for dirty hands best described? Fifth, there is the issue of the relation of the dirty hands problem to that of moral dilemmas and the requirements of some form of moral absolutism.

Let us examine these in turn. The structure of dirty hands is such that it seems to involve a contradiction or paradox. The advocate of dirty hands says in effect that it is sometimes right to do what is wrong, and this seems tantamount to saying that some act is both wrong and not wrong. But the dirty hands theorist is not saying that it is wrong in some respects and right in others, nor that what would normally be wrong is here right. Rather, it is the whole act in context that is both categorically wrong and not wrong. In the dirty hands scenario we are asked to believe that doing X is morally wrong and yet it is palpably right to do it. As Walzer has more recently written of his own position, it is both “provocative and paradoxical” (Walzer 2004a, 33). Kai Nielson has urged the point even more strongly, but something of the sort has puzzled many who contemplate the problem. The category of dirty hands, as described by Walzer and some others is, according to Nielson “a conceptual confusion with unfortunate moral residues” (Nielson 2000, 140). Clearly such a dismissal would come naturally to a utilitarian or most consequentialists who would simply declare the dirty hands decision to be one in which a right act (that producing the best consequences in terms of preference satisfactions, overall increase in happiness or whatever) has been done though it may have been distressing to do it. Nielson disavows utilitarianism and calls himself a “weak consequentialist” but the upshot is much the same. He thinks that dirty hands situations confront an agent with a choice of two evils and the agent should always choose the lesser evil. No doubt, in acting against what in other circumstances is a deep moral constraint, the agent will experience distress; she will “feel guilty” but feeling guilty is not to be confused with being guilty (Nielson 2000, 140).

From the opposite direction the problem can also be resolved by the denial that the hands should become dirty. An insistence on the inviolability of some moral prescriptions makes the paradox disappear as neatly as the Nielson manoeuvre. If we hold to the prohibition on intentionally killing the innocent, for example, in the face of crises like that supposed by Walzer to necessitate the bombing of German cities in the early phase of World War II, then there are no dirty hands to have. Such a position is often called absolutist. Absolutist positions have been explicitly held by many philosophers, notably Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant, and implicitly perhaps by many more. The position involves complexities that we will examine later.

Both these responses agree in holding that moral reasons rightly dominate all others. Another way of defusing the strong appearance of contradiction is to hold that morality is not the only legitimate determinant of right action and that some other determinant may occasionally properly trump it. This provides one answer to the second point of clarification mentioned earlier. Dirty hands problems do not arise within morality but rather when morality clashes with some other rational necessity of a profound kind that correctly overrules it. [ 2 ] The overruling must inspire regret, possibly remorse, but it is nonetheless clear that the overruling is in order, indeed required. Here, it is important to acknowledge that the overruling in question is not merely a description of what often happens. It is common knowledge that the demands of morality are often enough overridden by other persuasive demands, such as imperatives of self-interest, careerism, political advantage and friendship. It may even be that politics is an arena in which such overpowering happens more commonly than elsewhere, so that participation in it is fraught with moral hazard that requires an exceptional moral character to overcome. Nonetheless, the importance and challenge of the dirty hands scenario is not that hands get dirty from time to time, but that it is right that they do so.

If we allow that non-moral “oughts” can sometimes trump moral ones then the dirty hands position may be restated as holding that, in circumstances of extremity, reasons of “necessity” (or whatever) defeat important moral reasons. This seems to be one plausible construal of Machiavelli when he talks of the necessity that rulers must learn how not to be good. Of course, he has the model of Christian morality in mind when he calls for its overriding and so may be understood as opposing one form of morality to another, but a good deal of his discussion can be treated as elevating “reasons of state” above morality. This is a rejection of the idea that moral reasons dominate all other reasons.

It may be useful here to distinguish between dominance and comprehensiveness. Most moral theorists hold that morality is both comprehensive and dominant, that is, it relevant to all decisions and where relevant it defeats all other reasons. One could however hold that morality is comprehensive but not dominant, or dominant but not comprehensive, or indeed neither dominant nor comprehensive. Our present inquiry is concerned with the first two options. The ideas of dominance and comprehensiveness express somewhat different pictures of the status of morality, though an exalted understanding of morality often draws on both. Morality’s dominance would consist in its trumping all other considerations whenever it is relevant to them, whereas morality’s comprehensiveness consists in its being universally relevant whether it trumps other considerations or not. On the present interpretation, dirty hands theorists accept morality’s comprehensiveness (at least with respect to the domains they are concerned with) but reluctantly reject its dominance for one class of decisions.

We might usefully contrast this with the position of the school of thinkers called “political realists” whose outlook has some affinity with the dirty hands theorists to the point that the two are sometimes confused. Realists are often viewed (and often present themselves) as rejecting the comprehensive relevance of morality by reference to something special about politics or international relations. So we find E.H. Carr stating as “the realist view” that “no ethical standards are applicable to relations between states…” (Carr 1962, 153). Other realists come close to this, though their views are clouded by uncertainties about morality’s provenance (as indeed are Carr’s). Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, claims: “The raw material of foreign affairs is, most of the time, morally neutral or ambiguous. In consequence, for the great majority of foreign-policy transactions, moral principles cannot be decisive” (Schlesinger 1971, 73).The influential American realist, Hans Morgenthau, is anxious to separate politics from morality by maintaining “the autonomy of the political sphere.” He recognises the autonomy of other spheres such as economics, law and morality, but insists that the political realist must “subordinate these other standards to those of politics” (Morgenthau 2006, 13). Here, he echoes the position of the German conservative thinker Carl Schmitt by whom he was clearly influenced. Schmitt became embroiled with the Nazi Party in the 1930s and enjoyed (if that is the word) some fame for a time as a theoretician for the Nazi cause. These quotations all suggest the idea that politics, or some significant area of it, such as international relations, falls quite outside the provenance of morality, thus denying morality comprehensiveness, though the reference to morality’s failure to be “decisive” hints at a denial of dominance. There are many obscurities in the stance of political realism, and this is not the place to unravel them, but in spite of the ambiguities in pronouncements of the leading theorists in the school, and in spite of some continuity between their outlook on politics and that of the dirty hands theorists, it is clear that the realist’s attitude to morality usually has quite a different flavour to that of the dirty hands theorists. [ 3 ] Part of this is captured by the difference between the denials of comprehensiveness and dominance, and this connects with the fact that when realists reject moral considerations they do so with no deep sense of regret or remorse for having done what is morally wrong.

The denial of dominance preserves a certain coherence for morality since it is not, as it were, at odds with itself; it is at times and in context at odds with something else which, following both Machiavelli and Walzer, might be called “necessity”. But what is this necessity? Clearly, it is not meant to be some form of deterministic necessity, since it would have been possible for the British leadership in World War II to have rejected the policy of city bombing outright, as their declared policy prior to the war had indicated they would do, a policy that their initial bombing practices indeed respected. [ 4 ] Yet there is a trace of this deterministic thought in the idea of supreme emergency with its implication of something that overwhelms the normal power of morality. We might recall in this connection Thomas Hobbes’s argument that moral dictates cannot apply when they would lead to self-destruction. Hobbes’s idea is that the rationality of self-preservation, which itself gives rise to morality, makes acting on morality null and void when acting on it would defy self-preservation. As Hobbes puts it: “The laws of nature oblige in foro interno ; that is to say, they bind to a desire that they should take place: but in foro externo : this is to the putting of them in act, not always. For he that should be modest, and tractable, and perform all he promises, in such time, and place, where no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others, and procure his own certain ruin, contrary to the ground of all laws of nature, which tend to nature’s preservation” (Leviathan, Ch. XV, p. 99).

Hobbes certainly does paint a totally isolated scenario for the person who would obey the moral law—“where no man else should do so”—and one might wonder whether the institution of promising could even exist in so bleakly uncooperative “time and place” as he supposes. But presumably a sufficient number of non-cooperators would serve to make one “a prey to others” and procure “certain ruin”, and it is the necessity of avoiding some such ruin that motivates the supreme emergency story, even though it is collective rather than individual ruin that lies at its heart. Hobbes’s exemption from the need to practice morality (rather than desire its operation) makes most sense on a contractarian view of morality or in connection with those moral obligations that are dependent upon agreement (even if other obligations are not). In a world in which hardly anyone kept their promises or adhered to their contracts, the sense of such commitments would dissipate and entering into what shell remained of them might be folly indeed, and very likely futile as well. But many other areas of morality are not like this, and so even where adherence to moral imperatives may be perilous in the extreme, it may not be the folly that Hobbes’s comments make it seem. One woman who survived Belsen, Hanna Levy-Haas, records in her diary a philosophical debate she had in the camp with a fellow Marxist, Professor K who argued the somewhat Hobbesian case (embellished with Marxist terminology) that morality did not apply in the camps because it was superseded by the survival imperative. She rejected his argument because it required her “simply to compromise with the enemy, to betray one’s principles, to deny spiritual values in the interests of saving one’s skin” (Levy-Haas 1982, 65). These comments indicate at the very least that the idea of “total ruin” is open to interpretations that see the abandonment or degrading of moral integrity as itself a primary ingredient in such ruin.

This excursion into the world of the Leviathan nonetheless helps give some sense to the idea that the practice of morality might be suspended for a time and hence morality itself moved aside by an external necessity. It thus helps show a way that the dirty hands story might be redeemed from incoherence, even if the idea that morality should sometimes be dominated by an external necessity proves unacceptable. The dirty hands position might then be coherent but false. So Hanna Levy-Haas could understand the Professor’s argument, but found reason to reject it.

Another route out of paradox would be to hold that the clash depicted by dirty hands theorists occurs within morality. Here, the idea might be that morality itself is not entirely coherent or self-consistent. In certain extreme circumstances, one powerful strand in morality comes into conflict with another. Even more clearly, Weber’s distinction between the ethics of ultimate ends and that of responsibility points in this direction. His idea is expressed somewhat opaquely, but he seems to be claiming that there are two strands in morality, or two types of morality, such that one may be applicable to ordinary life, but must yield to the other in matters political, especially those that involve difficult choices in a context of violence. Several passages in Walzer’s discussion tend in this direction. He holds that a morality of rights and a morality of consequences or utility co-exist in our moral outlook in such a way that although rights trump utility in normal circumstances, a “utilitarianism of extremity” rightly overrides the morality of rights in some rare circumstances. As he puts it: in a situation of supreme emergency, “a certain kind of utilitarianism reimposes itself”, this being “the utilitarianism of extremity” set against “a rights normality” (Walzer 2004a, 40).

This contrast between a rights ethic (or other deontological ethic) and utilitarianism is one way of locating the clash within morality itself. Another way is by having recourse to role morality: within morality itself there are general moral principles, rules etc. and then special moral requirements dictated by significant social roles. These can come into conflict, as when the lawyer’s obligation to provide her client with the best defence and to preserve confidentiality can conflict with the demands of impartial justice. So it might be argued that the political role has obligations and rights special to it that override more general moral obligations and rights. When it comes to the immensely important role of political leadership, we “cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule” as Lady Carbury puts it. This manoeuvre has the advantage of capturing something important in the dirty hands literature (and it is also present in the realist literature), namely, the emphasis on the special moral significance of the role of political leadership. Walzer, for instance, places great weight upon “what political leaders are for.” Talking of political and military leaders, he says, “The effect of the supreme emergency arguments should be to reinforce professional ethics, and to provide an account of when it is permissible (and necessary) to get our hands dirty” (Walzer 2004a, 42). An initial problem with this sort of move is that the special duties and rights of social roles are underpinned by general moral considerations since it is only those roles that can be morally supported by quite general moral considerations that will have a role morality. We may describe the code of the Mafia thug as the morality of his role, but usually it is mores rather morality being described. Even if it is a requirement of his role that a Mafia hit-man must murder anyone who snitches to the police, this is hardly a moral imperative of any sort. And where there are genuine moral duties to a role, and they are endorsed by broader moral considerations, we do not believe that this endorsement cannot itself be overruled by other general moral obligations. The requirements of professional confidentiality, for instance, can be so overridden, as when medical confidentiality regarding a doctor-patient communication stands in the way of saving a life. The famous Tarasof case is instructive in this respect. It concerned a counsellor at the University of California at Berkeley who learned from his client that he planned to kill his ex-girl friend. The counsellor was sufficiently worried that he broke confidentiality to tell the police who investigated but took no further action. The girl friend (Tarasof) was duly murdered by the client, and a court later held that the counsellor should have gone further and notified Tarasof or her family of the danger. [ 5 ] Other courts have been less demanding, but there is a general recognition that the professional duty of client confidentiality can be overridden by more pressing moral demands.

Indeed, the structure of the role morality defence of the dirty hands story provides a curious inversion of the role morality logic since that logic requires that emergency situations allow or even demand the overturning of the role duties by the more general demands of a deeper morality. By contrast, the dirty hands scenario requires the role morality to triumph over the deeper moral outlook that gives sense to the morality of role itself. Here we find yet another paradox generated by the dirty hands category. It could only be resolved by the insistence that the political role is unique among roles since in its case its moral power somehow transcends the general morality. (Or, if the dirty hands scenario applies beyond the political, it will be one of a small set of roles that is unique.) In fact, there is a strong strand of this political exceptionism inherent in the dirty hands story. Yet how could the political role have such a status? We might expect such an exaltation of the role from one such as Schmitt, but in fact Walzer himself is drawn to it. Walzer’s position has been cited as treating the dirty hands conflict as involving a clash between a rights ethic and a utilitarianism of extremity, but the following quote puts his position much more in the role morality arena. He says in his later treatment: “No government can put the life of the community and all its members at risk, so long as there are actions available to it, even immoral actions, that would avoid or reduce the risk….That is what political leaders are for; that is their first task” (Walzer 2004a, 42). Furthermore, the significance of this task is cashed out in terms of the supreme value of the specific “moral community” to which the political leader belongs. The leader’s obligations will involve calculations of utility, but, in extremis, his or her ultimate responsibility to that community trumps universalist utilitarian calculations as well as specific deontological constraints. When the “ongoingness” of a community’s way of life is threatened then the prospect is that of “a loss greater than any that can be imagined, except for the destruction of humanity itself” (Walzer 2004a, 43). These claims, if true, would certainly establish a pre-eminent, if not unique, significance for the political role, so they need close examination.

Walzer’s two quotes stress significantly different values that he has a tendency to conflate. The first is that of life itself for all members of the community, the second that of the continuity of a “way of life”. Survival is at issue in both cases but the significance and weight that each survival should have is surely very different. The prospect of universal massacre understandably puts stress upon anything constraining the scope of actions to prevent it, but the prospect of forced alterations, set-backs or radical changes to a way of life must be less threatening. Even a relatively benign foreign occupation may involve extensive and very regrettable changes to the way of life of the occupied community perhaps in the form of restrictions on traditional freedoms, such as those of political speech or religious expression, and a degraded position of citizenship vis-à-vis the occupiers. Yet throughout history modified life styles have evolved for such communities that make for the possibility of at least coping and even some flourishing. It is not at all obvious that slaughtering innocent people is justified in order to avoid such an outcome, or even outcomes notably worse on the same scale.

Even if dirty hands were permitted only to political communities facing extreme situations, it is not at all clear that the exemption should only be available to political communities that have states. Walzer does not exactly say this, but his pro-state bias is evident in his discussion of supreme emergency in Just and Unjust Wars . Early in that discussion, he says, for instance, “Can soldiers and statesmen override the rights of innocent people for the sake of their own political community? I am inclined to answer this question affirmatively, though not without hesitation and worry” (Walzer 1977, 254). Further, in a different essay on terrorism, Walzer rejects arguments on behalf of terrorism by non-state agents that are very similar to those that he accepts as legitimating the bombing of German cities. For example, he claims that the familiar terrorist excuse that they had no alternative in the face of oppression is only “a pretence.” As he puts it: “‘Last resort’ has only a notional finality; the resort to terror is ideologically last, not last in an actual series of actions, just last for the sake of the excuse” (Walzer 2004b, 54). Yet no such scepticism is expressed about the no alternative and last resort justifications offered by governments who use terrorism in supreme emergency.

But political communities other than states may surely face supreme emergencies, even allowing for the difficulties in interpreting the concept, so the way is open in principle for sub-state terrorism to be justified. This is a position that Walzer somewhat reluctantly seems now (in a parenthesis to a later reprinting of the terrorism article) to concede, though it goes somewhat against the grain of the article itself. The parenthetical comments, published in 2004, are: “Would terrorism be justified in a ‘supreme emergency’ as that condition is described [by Walzer in the earlier chapter called ‘Emergency Ethics’]. It might be, but only if the oppression to which the terrorists claimed to be responding was genocidal in character” (Walzer 2004b, 54). There are difficulties in matching the complex meanings of “genocide” to Walzer’s communitarian account of supreme emergency. For one thing, a Nazi victory would probably not have meant genocide for the British community yet, according to Walzer, they were facing supreme emergency. So, the sources of his differential treatment of state and sub-state terrorism remain a puzzle.

He goes on to deny that any actual recent terrorism has been “a means for avoiding disaster” rather than merely a “reaching for political success” (Walzer 2004b, 54). So the supreme emergency/dirty hands exemption seems available, given significant qualifications concerning probability of success, for terrorists aiming to save a communal way of life. In a later paper again, Walzer allows for exceptional cases in which sub-state terrorism might be excusable though not justifiable; he imagines as excusable “a terrorist campaign by Jewish militants against German civilians in the 1940s—if attacks on civilians had been likely (in fact they would have been highly unlikely) to stop the mass murder of the Jews” (Walzer 2006, 7). The shift from justifiable in the earlier quotation to excusable in the later clearly needs more explanation; Walzer seems hesitant, if not confused in his resort to these categories. Nonetheless, on Walzer’s own grounds, there would seem to be a case, given some likelihood of success, for the employment of terrorism by Palestinian groups seeking to salvage what remains of their community’s way of life from the ravages of Israeli occupation, settlement and military attack. It is perhaps pertinent to this prospect that the Palestinians refer to their dispossession and ongoing sufferings at the hands of Israel as “al-Nakba”: the catastrophe. No doubt, their achieving that prospect would involve some sort of “reaching for political success” but this hardly counts against its status as a response to supreme emergency. The point here is not to make any particular claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather to stress the idea, noted earlier, that Walzer’s move to a criterion of genocide is puzzling as the sole interpretation of what a threat to the continuity of a communal way of life could mean.

Walzer’s tendency to run together the categories of excuse and justification needs some comment because it is symptomatic of the tensions inherent in the dirty hands scenario. He realises in the 1973 article that it is important to distinguish them. Citing J.L. Austin, Walzer remarks that “the two can seem to come very close together…but they are conceptually distinct…an excuse is typically an admission of fault; a justification is typically a denial of fault and an assertion of innocence” (Walzer 1973, 170; Walzer 1974, 72). Yet dirty hands acts involve both an admission of fault and a justification. This tends to collapse the distinction since what is justified needs no excuse and the unjustifiable is sometimes excusable. Walzer’s discussion for the most part clearly treats the dirty hands decisions as justified in some sense, whatever is said about its role as excuse. It is notable that at least one commentator, Tamar Meisels, explicitly rejects the account in terms of justification in her discussion of terrorism and torture but she accepts dirty hands as providing grounds for excuse (Meisels 2008a, 213–221). Yet not only is this an unlikely interpretation of the tradition, but it renders the category of dirty hands far less interesting philosophically and ethically.

The discussion of the importance and extent of political community leads naturally to the question whether the need for dirty hands can be restricted to the political sphere. If hands must be dirtied to avoid widespread massacre, on the one hand, or damage to the moral-cum-political continuity of a community’s way of life, then why not to avoid the unjustified killing of individuals or small groups or the drastic disruption of individual or small group’s way of living. Why should the political community and the political role take such dramatic precedence over such significant groups as families and their associated roles? For that matter, why should it take precedence over the individual’s need for survival regardless of role? The answer to this is not entirely clear. In Walzer’s discussion of supreme emergency and the World War II city bombings, he confronts this question but his discussion is marked by what he himself calls “hesitation and worry”. It is also marked by appeals to what people are “likely to feel”, “what is not usually said” and similar phrases. He says: “…it is not usually said of individuals in domestic society that they necessarily will or that they morally can strike out at innocent people, even in the supreme emergency of self-defense. They can only attack their attackers. But communities, in emergencies, seem to have different and larger prerogatives. I am not sure that I can account for the difference, without ascribing to communal life a kind of transcendence that I don’t believe it to have” (Walzer 1977, 254). Nor, he thinks, can it simply be a matter of the numbers. Yet he persists with the superiority of the political community: “We might better say that it is possible to live in a world where individuals are sometimes murdered, but a world where entire peoples are enslaved or massacred is literally unbearable. For the survival and freedom of political communities—whose members share a way of life, developed by their ancestors, to be passed on to their children—are the highest values of international society” (Walzer 1977, 254). Leaving aside the quibble that an individual facing murder won’t find it possible to live on if she is actually murdered when perhaps she refuses to kill the innocent in order to survive, we might question the sensitivity of ignoring the way any murder victim’s close relatives find her death unbearable and the prospect of living on an agonising one. We might also wonder why “we” don’t find it unbearable to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people to preserve the survival and freedom of our political communities. Nor is the reference to “the highest values of international society” particularly compelling. Where “international society” refers to the society of states, as Walzer seems often to mean, then it is not surprising that such states hold their survival as a pre-eminent value, but non-state agents may understandably have different priorities. A mother scrounging for the survival of her children in the desperate conditions of a third-world slum or primitive refugee camp may just as plausibly see herself coming under what Walzer calls, in connection with political communities, “the rule of necessity (and necessity knows no rules)” (Walzer 1977, 254).

In his original article on dirty hands, Walzer allows in passing that the phenomenon he is exploring might have a place beyond politics. So, he says: “I don’t want to argue that it is only a political dilemma. No doubt we can get our hands dirty in private life also, and sometimes, no doubt, we should. But the issue is posed most dramatically in politics…” (Walzer 1974, 76). This concession has, however, little influence on his developed position which is focused wholly on extreme emergency in political contexts. (The original article is, after all, called, “Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands”.) Other writers have been puzzled by the heavy concentration on politics. Michael Stocker, for one, rejects this restriction (Stocker 2000, 32–3). Stocker also argues that the dirty hands phenomena, though distinctive in various ways, exhibit quite common features of moral conflicts more generally, and partly for this reason he thinks there is no logical incoherence in the dirty hands story. Stocker argues that what he calls double-counting, i.e., giving moral weight to impossible oughts, and allowing for non-action-guiding act evaluations, is a central feature of dirty hands, but is not restricted to them since they occur “across the board” of moral thinking and deciding.

However it should be located, the phenomenon of dirty hands can be easily assimilated to that of moral dilemma, but this is an assimilation that should be resisted. Someone confronted with a supreme emergency is indeed in what is often colloquially called “a moral dilemma” in the sense that she faces a disturbing and difficult choice situation, but that does not make it a moral dilemma in a philosophically interesting sense. In common parlance all sorts of situations that cause initial uncertainty and require hard moral thinking to sort out are called moral dilemmas, as philosophers who teach or consult on business ethics are fully aware. This usage is harmless enough, but the philosophical usage of the term points to a more disturbing situation and one that needs to be distinguished from dirty hands. Both the categories of dirty hands and moral dilemma involve agonising choice in which there will be grave moral loss either way. The most salient difference between the categories is that a moral dilemma arises only when the choice is such that neither horn is decisively supported by morality, indeed morality speaks equally against both. (There is a parallel dilemma for non-moral normative contexts, if there be any, where normative reasons speak equally against doing p or doing not- p .) Whichever way the agent chooses, her action is unjustified and there is no question of one course being more necessary or demanded than the other. By contrast, the dirty hands choice is always dictated as the “necessary” course: in the context of political emergencies, the community defence always wins the day even over innocent lives. This is the special feature that marks off dirty hands from moral dilemmas.

A relatively unexplored question concerns whether anything more informative than a reference to “emergency”, supreme or otherwise, can be provided to illuminate the typical circumstances in which it is claimed that hands must be dirtied. One line of clarification that might be attempted would be to scrutinise more carefully various broad situations in which moral action might be especially under strain in political contexts. A first suggestion might be that politics is essentially a zone of compromise, and it is the pressure of compromise that creates the need for dirty hands. It is certainly true that compromise is a pervasive feature of political life, but compromise is hardly unique to politics, nor is it necessarily a pressure for immoral conduct. Indeed, it is arguable that the capacity to compromise is an essential moral ingredient in all successful cooperative endeavours, since, apart from its instrumental value, it shows respect for other reasonable participants in public action. Nonetheless, compromise clearly has its morally dangerous side as indicated by our use of “compromised” to characterise someone whose principles have been sullied to an extent that makes them untrustworthy. Since a compromise is a sort of bargain where parties sacrifice some good objectives in order to gain others, it raises a question about how far such deals can go, and this brings us into dirty hands territory. Another situation, related to our earlier discussion of Hobbes, is that of moral isolation. As noted there, the fact that general adherence to morality has to a considerable degree broken down, might not give as great a dispensation from moral constraints as Hobbes supposes, but at least it poses starkly the rationale for compliance. A third situation that seems relevant here and needs further exploration is that of extrication. Politicians, and others, often find themselves in situations where they have inherited, or are otherwise constrained by, the decisions and policies of others (or even their previous selves) that they now judge unwise or even gravely immoral. So, for example, they may seek to end an unjust war to which their predecessors have committed the nation, but immediate cessation and withdrawal may not be desirable from several perspectives, including a moral point of view. They may very well think that the best extrication strategy requires a temporary continuation of the war, unjust as it is, with a view to a withdrawal that better secures the rights of innocent people and makes the withdrawal politically possible. Obviously, what such situations might allow in terms of continued immorality needs to be spelled out in more detail than space allows here, but equally, it seems clear that there is a potential for dirty hands discussion that moves fruitfully beyond the often-vague generalities of “emergency” or “extremity”.

Some recent discussions that are relevant to dirty hands problems are concerned with what Cécile Fabre has called “second best” moral justifications. In her book on the ethics of spying she argues that although spying activities can involve acts generally considered as morally wrong, such as blackmail, unwanted covert surveillance, and even treachery or treason, a resort to acts such as these can be morally justified in some contexts of gathering intelligence in a just cause. She qualifies this, however, in various ways including disqualifying such resorts when the cause for which the spying is undertaken is unjust. So, when discussing espionage activities by a nation and its agents to discover important secrets of another nation that they have unjust designs upon, such as waging an immoral war, she firmly denies such a nation the right to use those activities. If, for example, a nation A is planning an unjust war against nation B it would be morally unjustified in spying on a suspected cyber facility of B ’s with a view to destroying it, even if the facility is likely to be used against A (either as a pre-emption or in a later retaliation). Yet even here, A may be “second best” morally justified, indeed even have a moral duty, in undertaking such spying where it might lead to discovering that the facility is a civilian one and morally should not be targeted. That A ’s spying reveals the facility to be civilian and thus A refrains from attacking it is a sort of moral plus in its overall dark moral position in the matter. Fabre insists, therefore, that this second best moral justification allows A to proceed but leaves a “moral taint” on A ’s action since it shouldn’t be undertaking spying on Green at all in pursuit of an unjust intervention. This moral taint is a clear echo of the dirty hands story.

Another discussion with such an echo occurs in Tadros 2020, which endorses participating in a war that you know to be unjust in order to ensure that the war is fought with greater restraint (p. 55). Tadros makes no mention of “moral taint” and may see the choice as morally straightforward if unusual. It seems possible, however, to see it as involving dirty hands and the “moral taint” of participating in an unjust war, even for achieving some amelioration of the injustice. Either way, a difficulty with the position is that it’s hard to see how an individual enlisting in such a war could seriously imagine that they could have such an effect in a way that is remotely proportional to the extensive moral violations their involvement requires them to commit or condone, especially given the highly authoritarian structures of armed forces. Those structures mean that the individual would be under regular extreme pressure to kill enemy soldiers he has no moral right to harm, as well as the highly likely possibility of similar pressure to kill enemy civilians either directly or indirectly. Of course, the story might be different if the individual were conscripted to fight in an unjust war and made the second best of it by doing what they could to minimise the harms they, and others, did. This could also come under the heading of extrication morality if they also aimed to extricate themselves by, for instance, seeking opportunities to desert.

The discussion of extrication raises another point about dirty hands that is seldom addressed. Dirty Hands scenarios are often constructed very specifically as giving the agent narrow choices restricted by external circumstances over which she has no present control. The specific scenario is often then generalised as though those external circumstances, or ones very like them, are immutable for an agent with that sort of background (e.g., a politician). This is, however,, too static and inflexible a view of moral contexts, roles and agent capacities. In the extrication story discussed earlier, the politician’s “necessary immorality” is forced upon her by the circumstances she has created or inherited, but the point of invoking extrication morality within the dirty hands problematic is to insist on possibilities of temporary involvement in evil and the need to change the circumstances that require such involvement. The ruler bent on extrication must persist in waging an unjust war only because at that time there is no other way that she can end the war by changing the context. But this restriction should be seen here and in other dirty hands situations as creating a moral imperative for the agent or others to change the background against which the moral crisis has arisen so that similar situations are unlikely to recur. In the unjust war example, the politician might use eventual success in ending the war to change colonial or neo-colonial policies that fed the resort to war, to remove over-belligerent personnel from the defence establishment, rethink alliances that played a part in promoting the unjust war, and so on. Courage, imagination and luck may be needed to realise the relevant possibilities, but without making efforts at relevant changes, the agent’s appeal to necessity when invoking the dirty hands plea should ring hollow.

Most of the discussion of dirty hands concentrates upon the situation of the individual political leader who must dirty his or her hands, but another interesting question concerns the dirt on the hands of citizens themselves when their leaders act thus on their behalf. This is particularly acute for democratic citizens to whom representative theory applies more plausibly than to citizens of an autocracy. In Walzer’s original discussion, he insists that part of the tension, even agony, of the dirty hands problem arises from the fact that we, the governed, want our leaders to be virtuous, but also want them to have the sort of character that can act against deep moral principle when the supreme emergency arises. Of the politician who dirties his hands in a good cause but realises he is acting immorally, Walzer writes: “Because he has scruples of this sort we know him to be a good man. But we…hope that he will overcome his scruples…We know he is doing right when he makes the deal because he knows he is doing wrong” (Walzer 1973, 166; 1974, 68). But if so, our endorsement would seem to have some implication for our own hands. This is not an implication that Walzer fully explores, though he does say in the last sentence of his original article when discussing the need to penalise dirty hands that we can’t punish the dirty hands of the principal agents “without getting our own hands dirty, and then we must find some way of paying the price ourselves” (Walzer 1973, 180; 1974, 82).

Various other writers have however explored the implication, either directly or as part of the discussion of the supposed need to “punish” dirty hands (for this topic see below). Most recently David Archard complains that “…there has been little discussion of the putative complicity, and thus also dirtying of hands, of a democratic public that authorizes politicians to act in its name” (Archard 2013, 777). Here he echoes an earlier position taken by Martin Hollis and also similar claims made by Dennis Thompson. As Hollis puts it: “Political actors, duly appointed within a legitimate state, have an authority deriving finally from the People. Currently that means from you and me.… When their hands get dirty, so do ours” (Hollis 1996, 146–7). Like Walzer they assume that somehow the ruled require the rulers to dirty their hands, and this opens the way to distribute some degree of responsibility or “dirt” to them.

Taking Walzer’s claim first, it is not at all obvious that “we” want or hope that our leaders will violate deep moral prohibitions where they judge it necessary to achieve important political ends or avoid very bad outcomes, even if they remain conscious of their wrongdoing. No doubt some of us do and some of us don’t, but the issue is not really one of counting the preponderance of desire in the community; it is rather whether there is something inherent in the relation of the democratic citizenry to its leadership that authorizes the leaders to dirty their hands in the relevant way. Archard explicitly argues for such an authorization, claiming that it is this authorization that gives the citizens a share in the taint of dirty hands. Hollis, Dennis Thompson, Neil Levy and Janna Thompson rely upon some similar link.

But what exactly is this the nature of this authorization? It must be more than simply giving certain people the authority to govern on our behalf since that seems compatible with implicit or explicit restrictions upon what they can or cannot do. Clearly, Archard needs some strengthening of what the authorization allows; he tries to achieve this by using the idea of a division of labor. Specifically, he argues that there is a both a political and a moral division of labor (Archard 2013, 782). The political is relatively uncontroversial: it is the thesis that efficiency is best served by the legitimate, multiple tasks required in a community being divided and the task of governing is one of them. This makes no further normative claims about restrictions or entitlements related to the exercise of those tasks, and is compatible with most forms of government. The moral division asserts that the different roles in society carry with them different moral prerogatives and duties appropriate to the different roles. But whatever the merits of such role morality, it is not clear that it permits rulers to do anything at all that they believe will fulfill the purposes of their role. Combining the idea of role with that of authorization cannot show that the authorized role player is entitled to use whatever means he or she judges the only effective way of achieving the role’s purposes. If it did, then authorizing a debt collector would seem to imply that the agent may torture the debtor if that is the only way to collect a significant debt.

It might be conceded that this is ludicrous in the debt-collecting example, but that the political role is different because of the very high stakes, not only for the politicians, but for the democratic citizens. Yet we have already seen that it is hard to contain the dirty hands story within the realm of the political, and very few political decisions are momentous enough to give politics a status sufficiently privileged to exempt its practitioners, through that role, from those deep moral constraints that restrict the debt-collector or other agents in non-political life. Indeed, consciousness of these facts helps explain why Walzer has progressively tightened the conditions in which dirty hands apply. So the question about authorization must focus on whether “we” can plausibly be said to have authorized violations of deep moral principle in supreme emergency situations. Dennis Thompson insists we do when he says that the dirty hands politician acts “not only for us, but with our consent—not only in our name but on our principles” (Thompson 1987, 18).

This confident answer to the question is not however supported by argument or even survey, and seems to assume unanimity amongst the “we” of a pluralistic, democratic community that is unlikely to obtain. Dennis Thompson relies upon the legitimacy of the democratic process and citizens’ assent to its outcomes, but, aside from any general problems with consent theory, the ruler’s dirty hands acts are often enough illegal or unconstitutional, as in the case of torture, or in violation of declared policies that got the ruler elected. Moreover, what we want of our political leaders will presumably depend upon who “we” are and what moral and political principles “we” hold. Suppose a dirty hands decision has been made by the leaders to torture an innocent child in order to extract information from the child’s radical parent about a “ticking bomb” (and suppose that this is a genuine dirty hands decision and not one flawed by lack of knowledge or ignoring of preferable alternatives) then it is plausible to hold that those citizens who think that the moral politician should violate his (and their) deep moral objections to torture in such circumstances must share in the guilt or shame that should attach to the politician. But there will surely be many citizens who either think that the moral violation should not have occurred, even in these circumstances, or who think that the prohibition is not as deep as commonly supposed and hence that the politician’s decision is right but not immoral. It is implausible to hold that both these groups are implicated in dirty hands in the way Archard and others suggest that all democratic citizens, merely by being citizens, are.

Moreover there is a further question underlying the question of consent or authorization or expectation, namely that concerning what we ought to want, expect or authorize and what principles we ought to have. This is the question whether politicians ought to get their hands dirty, in any sense of “ought” that carries ultimate weight. If the politicians are right (in certain, presumably extreme, circumstances) to dirty their hands and they are right to do it on our behalf, then at least those of us who agree that it is right are involved in what they do and have some responsibility for it. Indeed, we are more than tainted, we are complicit.

Emphasizing the shared guilt of citizens has implications for a further issue, concerned with how the dirty hands perpetrator should be treated after the event. Walzer argues that the politician’s genuine guilt means that she should suffer a penalty or a shaming for having done what “we” want her to do (Walzer 1973, 177–8; 1974 79–80). Others have taken a similar line though the position has been criticized by, for example, Tamar Meisels and Neil Levy (Meisels 2008a, 227 and Levy 2007 throughout). There are serious problems about moral responsibility in claiming that a dirty hands agent who does what is morally wrong because he must should be punished or publicly disgraced. After all, if the freedom to act is a precondition of moral responsibility and therefore blame, then the dirty hand agent who does what is (all-things-considered) necessary and somehow right seems immune to the criticism involved in blame. (For further elaboration of this and related objections see Levy 2007; also Meisels 2008a, 226–27.) The point here, however, is that, even if it is proper to blame and shame for dirty hands, then, on the supposition that all citizens share in the taint, selecting only one to shame seems distinctly unjust, indeed massively hypocritical. While the rest of us rejoice and celebrate the happy consequences of our agent’s necessary misdeed, she is shunned or worse. As already noticed, Walzer does think that punishing the dirty hands conduct of the principal agents makes our own hands dirty (though he doesn’t seem to think that our original authorization of the conduct does this). He doesn’t elaborate the point, but it opens up intriguing prospects since presumably we dirty “our” hands in punishing these agents precisely because, in some sense, they are “innocent” or at least do not deserve punishment because they have acted “rightly”. This opens up bizarre possibilities of regress since “we” now should have to pay a further price for inflicting a price on ourselves when we have done the right (but immoral) thing in punishing ourselves, and so on and on. It seems the spreading of responsibility for dirty hands to the governed community merely adds to worries about the coherence of the concept.

Claims of shared guilt or taint raise further questions about the responsibility that democratic citizens as well as their leadership have for remedying the evil done to the victims of the dirty hands decision. Stephen de Wijze (de Wijze, 2018) argues that not only must the leadership try to justify their decision to their constituents, but they and all their democratic citizens are liable to make restitution to victims for the “necessary” harm done by the dirty hands decision. Admittedly, he thinks that that although the citizens are complicit their “moral pollution” is generally less than the leadership. Even so, they are obliged to make amends to the victims of the decision. All citizens, he argues, even those dissenting from the decision, must “share in the moral burden, and contribute to the appropriate restitution” (de Wijze, 2018, 144). So they must pay “some penalty” perhaps in the form to increased taxation to effect reparations.

The claim that all democratic citizens are so obliged needs some unpacking since there is clearly a difference in liability for those who enthusiastically supported or were indifferent to the dirty hands tactic and those who opposed it. There is some plausibility in the claim that even strongly dissenting democratic citizens incur some restorative and other moral obligations as a result of their leaders’ dirty hands behaviour, but support for this claim need not resort to dubious extensions of the idea of collective guilt or moral taint. Membership in a democratic political community (or even in some non-democratic ones) creates a set of relationships that involve forms of identification such that a degree of pride can be taken in good decisions by the leadership and by fellow citizens and a degree of shame or alienation at bad ones. None of this means that the dissenting citizen is in any way morally responsible for those decisions, but what it may mean is that the dissenting citizen has some special moral responsibility to criticise those decisions, including the dirty hands ones that she rejects, and to do what is possible, in spite of her lack of pollution or guilt, to repair the bad effects. Responsibility for bad acts should be distinguished from responsibility to remedy or compensate for them, though it is a complex matter how to sketch the lineaments of this distinction.

Both dirty hands and moral dilemmas challenge the idea that some moral prohibitions or negative duties are “absolute” though they do so in different ways. If we deny that there are moral rules or prohibitions that stand whatever the context, then it will not be surprising that deep moral prohibitions may be legitimately overridden in some circumstances. Indeed, many contemporary moral theories, other than utilitarianism, insist that such overruling remains a permanent possibility. The intuitionism of W.D. Ross and his followers, for instance, insists that all duties and obligations are prima facie. It is always possible that the prima facie duty not to kill the innocent will clash with some other prima facie duty, such as the duty to promote wellbeing or the ruler’s duty to preserve the state or protect the community, and then one’s actual duty will be the outcome of weighing the respective force of the clashing prima facie duties. One might thus see the dirty hands story as merely a version of this outlook, a version that insists that only a very great weighting on the other side of the balance can tip the scales against some very significant prima facie obligations. Using terminology of Thomas Nagel’s, dirty hands would instantiate “threshold deontology” with a very high threshold for certain action types. To make this assimilation would be to take much of the sting out of the dirty hands story, both because dirty hands would be part of a more commonplace moral perspective rather than a quite special ethic for emergencies, and because there seems to be no room in threshold deontology, or what has been called “balanced exceptionism” (Coady 2004, 778–9; Coady 2008, 285–7, 299). for the idea that one has done wrong in doing what is nonetheless right. There may be a sense of regret that one cannot avoid doing something that was prima facie wrong—it would be more comfortable if one’s prima facie duties did not conflict and therefore need resolution—but no wrong can be attributed to you if you have done the balancing conscientiously. [ 6 ] The balanced exceptionist can of course acknowledge that some prima facie duties are stronger than others, and hence some presumptive wrongs carry more heft than others. Indeed, the balancing story commits its supporters to this acknowledgement since there would be no point to the talk of balancing as a procedure for decision unless there were such differences of weight. But the fact remains that the granting of exemption from the prohibition on intentionally killing the innocent is part of a normal, even routine, business of balancing presumptive obligations in order to find what is finally obligatory or prohibited. If the scales tell you that it is morally permitted or even morally obligatory intentionally to kill the innocent, then in these circumstances it cannot be wrong to do so. [ 7 ]

In fact, there is an interesting comparison here with utilitarianism. As we have seen, it is common to contrast balanced exceptionism or threshold deontology with utilitarianism and to establish dirty hands as a form of deontology (or intrinsicalism) that yields to the utilitarianism of extremity. But there may be room for a utilitarian version of the threshold story, even possibly the dirty hands story. Surely a sophisticated version of utilitarianism, such as rule or indirect utilitarianism, can have room for the idea that duties, virtues etc. cannot be overridden by ordinary calculations of utility since to allow this would be to risk too much overall disutility. It is only in situations of dire or “supreme” emergency that the disutility of abiding by the prohibitions or rules would be great enough to override the utilitarian value of keeping to the rule. [ 8 ] So, depending upon the empirical facts and calculations, a utilitarian can admit a role for thresholds, supreme emergencies, and even dirty hands. But while this might give us a utilitarian version of threshold deontology, it will not do as a version of dirty hands, since the utilitarian overriding at the supreme emergency stage will involve a decision that is simply right, and not in any sense right but still wrong. The only sense in which it remains wrong is that weak sense, akin to that attributed to Ross in endnote 35, in which it would have been wrong but for the supreme emergency. For the utilitarian, (as indeed for Ross) there is no real moral remainder, though there may be some room for psychological discomfort.

The moral remainder and the remorse it generates signals the tribute that dirty hands pays to moral absolutism. While actually rejecting moral absolutes, the dirty hands theorist remains entranced by the significance they give to certain moral constraints. But how do we decide whether moral absolutism should be rejected? It is difficult in the nature of the case to see what could resolve a dispute between absolutists and non-absolutists. Absolutists do not typically regard all moral prohibitions as absolute; they restrict their claim to a few such prohibitions, such as those against intentional killing of the innocent, rape and (for some theorists) torture. Their opponents claim that, even for these cases, emergency scenarios can be imagined in which “our” intuitions accept the legitimacy of such acts. Where absolutists don’t reject the scenarios as merely fantastic (as some certainly are), they simply have different intuitions about the force of the examples. Moreover, they can point out that most moral theorists, including their opponents, are absolutists about some moral issues. Utilitarians allow no exceptions “whatever the circumstances” to their basic rule of maximising satisfactory outcomes, Rawlsian contractualism gives an absolute priority to certain principles of liberty, and similar points apply to other theories normally opposed to absolutism. It might be replied that the level at which absolutism applies is different, and this is true since the absolutist endorses specific moral prohibitions such as that on murder or torture whereas the other theories are usually absolute at a more abstract level. Yet it is unclear why this is an important difference, or why, if it is, it should count against the absolutist. After all, it is surely plausible that our conviction that murder or torture is always wrong has more authority than any conviction that we should always maximise the greatest happiness of the greatest number or always maximise preference satisfaction. Moreover, some specific moral prohibitions seem proof against even fantastic counter-examples, e.g., the principle that it is wrong to torture an innocent child for fun. But, even here, it may be hazardous to underestimate the ingenuity of philosophers in constructing bizarre counter-examples. Clearly, more remains to be said about the nature of a defensible (or objectionable) absolutism, but our discussion at least serves to indicate the significance of absolute prohibitions for the framing of dirty hands scenarios.

A further interesting issue about absolutism is its common association with some versions of religious ethics, especially the Judeo-Christian. Certainly, there seems to be a strong element of it in traditional Catholic moral theology, and Elizabeth Anscombe, who was a committed Catholic of a theologically conservative cast of mind, wrote an influential article (1958) which was, inter alia , an early contemporary defence of absolutism against the balanced exceptionism of much (she thought all) of the then current moral philosophy. Anscombe tied the notion of moral obligation in the use of “ought” and “ought not” to the concept of Divine Law the increased unfashionability of appeal to the commands of which in connection with obligation having palpably diminished outside religious circles (Anscombe 1958). Even within those circles, however, there are problems with a Divine Command ethic as an endorsement of absolutism. One can be illustrated through the Biblical story of Abraham’s response to God’s command that he should kill and sacrifice to God his son Isaac. In the Akedah, as the tale is often named, Abraham complies until a messenger from God stays his hand at the last moment. Since the intentional killing of an innocent child is a prime example of the absolutely forbidden for Anscombe and others there is an obvious incompatibility between a divine command ethic in general and this particular command from God that Abraham is so ready to obey. Exegetes have had various explanations of Abraham’s situation and this is not the place to explore them, other than to point to the primary difficulty of God’s commanding Abraham to to form and begin to put into action the intention to murder his child.

It is noteworthy that at least one Catholic scholar Evan Sandsmark has argued forcefully that the rejection of dirty hands, implicit and explicit the Catholic theological absolutist moral tradition is mistaken, and moreover acceptance of the dirty hands category is consistent with absolutism, and even requires it, thereby reinforcing the relevance of my earlier point about the tribute that dirty hands pays to absolutism. His argument is that the moral taint that is essential to the dirty hands act of necessity is best explained by its involving a guilty violation of an absolute prohibition. Since the prohibition remains absolute though the violator has by hypothesis done the right thing then the agent must be remorseful and seek penance and appropriate recompense for the offence. Sandsmark’s ingenious argument strains the sense of the term “absolute” since some sort of “necessity” makes the prohibition no longer absolutely binding, bringing it nearer to Igor Primoratz’s “almost absolute” category in connection with the prohibition of terrorist acts of intentionally killing the innocent (Primoratz, 2013, 110–113). It also seems to inherit the problem discussed earlier in this entry about separating the overwhelming dirty hands necessity from morality only at the possible cost of achieving coherence at the cost of falsity.

Walzer’s attitude to absolutism is (as it has to be) one of respectful rejection. He says: “I don’t believe that terrorism can ever be justified. But I also don’t want to defend an absolute ban. ‘Do justice though the heavens fall’ has never seemed to me a plausible moral position” (Walzer 2006, 7). Elsewhere, he says, after claiming that absolutism is “very old, perhaps older than anything else in our moral understanding”, that at the point of disaster or supreme emergency “absolutism represents, it seems to me, a refusal to think about what it means for the heavens to fall” (Walzer 2004a). Such a refusal can indeed be represented as obtuse, but when we come to cash out contemporary thinking about falling heavens we might think about the issue of torture, an issue that was one of Walzer’s earliest examples generating dirty hands. The easy acceptance since September 11, 2001, amongst some intellectuals of the recourse to torture in situations of emergency, frequently it would seem far short of “supreme”, has raised questions of the relevance of absolutism even on the part of those who had previously endorsed dirty hands or exceptionism of some sort. So, Henry Shue, for instance, always a strong opponent of torture, had nonetheless allowed in his original treatment of the issue that torture might be morally permissible in certain “extreme” circumstances (Shue 1977–78). But in a later, Shue criticises his own admission and the widespread intellectual acceptance of torture in extremis as a resort to “dreamland” (Shue 2006). By this he means that the philosophers’ stories about “ticking bomb” scenarios are basically fantasies that distract from the reality of moral assessment in the real world. Shue’s opposition is now, as a matter of practice, resolute and absolute. Others have also expressed a commitment to a sort of absolutism in connection with torture. Bob Brecher, for example, provides a criticism of the ticking bomb scenario (which is basically the scenario Walzer uses in his original paper on dirty hands) and from a purely consequentialist perspective endorses the need for an absolute condemnation of torture (Brecker 2007). As mentioned earlier, Igor Primoratz somewhat similarly recognises the pull of absolutism about some moral imperatives and argues for “almost absolute.” So the debate about torture largely engendered by the “war on terror” has revived interest in the credentials of moral absolutism, although much about the nature and types of absolutism remain in need of clarification. In any event, there is clearly reason to approach the topic of dirty hands with a degree of suspicion regarding Lady Carbury’s enthusiasm for “beneficent audacity” and her contempt for measuring exceptional people by the “ordinary rule” appropriate to the rest of us.

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A short history of campaign dirty tricks before Twitter and Facebook

Subscribe to governance weekly, elaine kamarck elaine kamarck founding director - center for effective public management , senior fellow - governance studies @ekamarck.

July 11, 2019

• 17 min read

This post is part of “ Cybersecurity and Election Interference ,” a Brookings series that explores digital threats to American democracy, cybersecurity risks in elections, and ways to mitigate possible problems.

To do that, we should distinguish between dirty tricks and negative campaigning, including attack ads and contrast ads. The latter may be offensive but they are based on something that is true as opposed to something that is a wholesale fabrication. For instance, let’s take one of the most infamous ads from the 1988 presidential campaign pitting Vice President George H.W. Bush (R) against Governor Michael Dukakis (D): the Willie Horton ad. It has gone down in history as one of the more offensive and racially incendiary ads ever. Willie Horton, a black prisoner convicted of murder, was released on a prison furlough program in Massachusetts. While out on furlough he kidnapped a young couple, stabbed the man and raped the woman. The ad features a scary photo of Willie Horton and under a photo of Michael Dukakis it says “Allowed Murderers to have Weekend Passes.” The weekend furlough program was created in 1972 under a Republican Governor as the result of a court decision. Dukakis himself defended it. [1]

But both the program and Willie Horton were real. The circumstances surrounding the crime were accurately described, the visual image was true to life even if sensationalized, and there were numerous news stories attesting to the facts of the case.

Now compare this ad to an incident in the 2016 campaign where nothing was real: Pizzagate. In the 2016 presidential campaign, social media outlets spread the story referring to campaign manager John Podesta’s hacked email accounts that his emails contained coded messages referring to human trafficking and a child sex ring run by high-ranking members of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton. This activity was allegedly based in a Washington, D.C. pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. The conspiracy theory spread quickly, promoted by various right-wing websites and by the Russians. As the rumors grew so did harassment of the owners and employees of the pizzeria, culminating in a shooting incident by a North Carolina man who took it upon himself to come to Washington and rescue the poor children.

The incident illustrates how the difference between dirty tricks and negative campaigning is that dirty tricks are complete lies.

Nothing about Pizzagate was real. There was no sex ring, no coded messages, and no children being held against their will at the pizza place. All the supposed “facts” spread in this story were completely fabricated. The incident illustrates how the difference between dirty tricks and negative campaigning is that dirty tricks are complete lies. The political journalist David Mark makes a similar distinction: “First, I want to distinguish negative campaigning—charges and accusations that, while often distorted, contain at least a kernel of truth—from dirty tricks or cheating.” [2]

To understand the world of dirty tricks it helps to understand their function in the context of an election. Elections are fought over a finite period of time—Election Day is the endpoint—and public interest increases as Election Day approaches. Unlike a dirty trick against a corporation, which might be remedied in time for a product to rebound, a dirty trick timed to occur before the election can have a definitive impact even if it is proven to be false. The ramifications can be enormous because U.S. elections cannot be re-run.

A brief summary of some of the dirty tricks in American elections shows that they tend to have the following objectives:

• create doubt around a candidate’s character;
• confuse the voters about the election;
• break into the opponent’s sphere and get information on them;
• affect the actual outcome by interfering with the counting process.

Candidate character

Sex has long been a favorite topic of the dirty trick. [3] In the early 1800’s politics was no less suffused with innuendo than today. Among the most salacious stories were those penned by the partisan journalist James Callender, who alleged in a series of articles that Thomas Jefferson had fathered several children with his young slave, Sally Hemings. For nearly two centuries this was held up as an early example of dirty campaigning. In 1998, thanks to DNA testing, it turned out that Thomas Jefferson had indeed fathered illegitimate children with his slave.

Two centuries later, the combination of illicit sex and race was still the ideal fodder for the creation of a dirty trick. In the 2000 Republican presidential primary then-Governor George Bush of Texas was running against Senator John McCain of Arizona. McCain won the New Hampshire primary and the race went on to South Carolina where the Bush campaign knew they had to stop McCain. Using a tried and true strategy, the phony poll, opponents of McCain spread a complete falsehood. Phone calls to South Carolina Republican voters asked “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain… if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” McCain and his wife Cindy had adopted a dark-skinned girl from Bangladesh in 1991 and that child, Bridget, was campaigning with them in South Carolina.

Confronted with attacks on their wives and children, candidates have a hard time defending themselves. McCain was distraught at this attack and his efforts to fight back only made his situation worse. He lost the South Carolina primary and the nomination.

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His emotional reaction to an attack on his family was not unusual. In 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination to run against President Richard Nixon. While campaigning in New Hampshire the editor of the all-important Manchester Union Leader received a letter from a New Hampshire citizen accusing Muskie of using the word “Canuck,” a derogatory term for French Canadians—a significant part of the New Hampshire electorate. Muskie never did any such thing. (The letter was later discovered to have been written by a White House aide to President Nixon, Kenneth Clawson). At the same time, the editor of the Manchester Union Leader insulted Muskie’s wife, calling her unladylike for drinking too much and telling jokes. Muskie gave a press conference where he was furious and appeared to cry. Whether there were tears or a melted snowflake on his face, the damage was done. Muskie won New Hampshire but by a much smaller percentage than was anticipated (especially given that he was from a neighboring state.) The narrow victory devastated his candidacy and he lost the Democratic nomination to George McGovern, who turned out to be the weak nominee Nixon preferred.

For much of American history, being gay was a non-starter for a politician. As early as 1836 the hero Davy Crocket wrote that presidential candidate Martin Van Buren was “laced up in corsets, such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the rest of them.” The famous FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover spread rumors that the 1950s Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson was gay; ironically, Hoover has been the subject of much rumor and speculation about his sexuality. New York City was the first city which stood up to this tactic. In the 1977 mayoral primary placards appeared out of nowhere that read “vote for Cuomo, not the homo,” in reference to Mario Cuomo. Cuomo’s opponent Ed Koch won the primary and never directly addressed the rumors about his sexual orientation. These days this line of attack seems almost quaint given the large number of openly gay elected officials, but being a closeted gay seemed a sure way to catch the ire of both the gay and straight community.

Even if a lie is too outrageous for most people to believe, in a tight race only a very small fraction of the electorate needs to believe it.

One of the many problems with complete lies attacking the candidate’s character is that they are sometimes so outrageous that the campaign refuses to take them seriously. Or, the campaign knows they are a threat but doesn’t want to increase the reach of the dirty trick by giving the lie even more publicity. However, even if a lie is too outrageous for most people to believe, in a tight race only a very small fraction of the electorate needs to believe it. And big lies remind people of the old saying “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” A story that is not plausible on its face may still prompt some to believe that something is wrong with the candidate.

Nearly all of these problems surfaced with the “swift boat” campaign against Senator John Kerry. Kerry had served in Vietnam and was awarded a purple heart, a bronze star and a silver star. In 2004, his service and his heroism in war stood in contrast to President Bush, who had not gone to Vietnam and who got into the Air National Guard through his political connections. Sowing doubt about Kerry’s war record was important to the Bush campaign. In the spring of 2004 a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, composed of Vietnam veterans who claimed to have been with Kerry during the incidents he was awarded medals for, began to hold press conferences and buy television ads questioning each of his medals. A long-time critic of John Kerry (for his later public opposition to the Vietnam War) wrote a book about Kerry called “Unfit for command.”

The Kerry campaign’s reaction was slow and ineffectual. His top consultants kept restraining him from hitting back out of fear that he would look angry and that it would add even more fuel to the fire. And yet they sorely misjudged the impact the ongoing story was having on cable news during the critical month of August 2004. I was asked to be on Bill O’Reilly show on Fox News during this time. I was not in the Kerry Campaign but as a Democrat was expected to defend him. I asked the campaign for its take on the issue and found there was no response. Susan Estrich, another Democrat, was asked to be on Hannity and Colmes to talk about the ads and had the same experience—there was no help from the campaign. [4]

A review of Kerry’s war record was conducted by the Navy in September of 2004 and found that the medals were all properly awarded. And Bush himself eventually disavowed the group, but the damage had been done. The big lie only has to sow doubt and the closer the race the more impact it can have.

Confusing the voters

Attempting to confuse the voters is another tried and true characteristic of the dirty trick.  Sometimes this is inadvertent but nonetheless critical; the best example being the confusing “butterfly” ballot design that caused voters in the 2000 presidential election in Florida to vote for Al Gore and Republican Pat Buchanan or Al Gore and Socialist David McReynold—thus invalidating their ballots. [5]

But at other times it is intentional. An early example of intentionally confusing the voters comes from John F. Kennedy’s first run for Congress in 1946 in Boston. In Boston then (and now), the two dominant ethnic groups were Irish and Italian and the state was heavily Democratic—meaning that winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the general election. Kennedy, Irish, was running in the Democratic primary against a Boston City Councilor named Joe Russo, an Italian. Kennedy’s father, Joe, allegedly paid another Joseph Russo (this one a custodian with no political experience) to also run in the primary in hopes of splitting the non-Kennedy vote. [6]

Another way to confuse the voters is to populate the ballot with third-party candidates who are recruited for the express purpose of siphoning votes from the major party. In 2010 a Republican dirty trickster in Arizona got friendly with a group of homeless people and recruited them to run on the Green Party ticket for a variety of offices. Among them were a tarot card reader with less than a dollar to his name who was signed up to run for State Treasurer, a homeless man who went by “Grandpa” on the streets who was recruited to run for the State Senate, and a young street musician who was recruited to run for a seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission. Democrats and Green party officials were furious and filed a lawsuit but failed to get the fake candidates’ names off the ballot.

Another tried-and-true dirty trick is to attempt to confuse the voters about important election dates.

Another tried-and-true dirty trick is to attempt to confuse the voters about important election dates. In the 2018 election Congressman Lee Zeldin (R-NY) sent out flyers telling his constituents that they had to return their absentee ballots by November 6. The actual deadline was November 5 and ballots received after that were not counted. Democrats were suspicious that the “mistake” was meant to keep students from voting but Zeldin’s campaign denied any wrongdoing and provided a statement from the printer also saying it was a mistake. The problem was that the Zeldin campaign made the same “mistake” in 2016 as well, fueling suspicion that this was a dirty trick.

In 2012 Wisconsin Democrats, furious over Republican Governor Scott Walker’s attacks on public-sector unions, mounted a successful recall petition creating a new election. The 2012 recall election was contested between Walker and Democrat Tom Barrett. As the June 5, 2012 primary date approached, voters reported receiving robocalls (a favorite tool of dirty tricksters) that told voters that if they had signed recall petitions they were not required to vote in the recall election. Walker won the race with 53 percent of the vote.

Breaking and entering

As we now know, breaking and entering can be physical or digital. The most famous physical breaking and entering was the break-in at Democratic National Committee Headquarters on June 17, 1972, at the Watergate Building in Washington D.C. This began a two-year-long investigation that revealed how President Richard Nixon’s CREEP (the appropriate acronym for the Committee to Re-elect the President) used a wide range of dirty tricks to assure Nixon’s re-election in 1972. Because the burglary was bungled and immediately publicized in the Washington Post, we’ll never know what sorts of information the burglars were after or how they intended to use it in the fall campaign. But the unraveling of that break-in revealed other break-ins—including the break-in at Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—and a plethora of dirty tricks carried out by the “plumbers,” a group dedicated to finding dirt on Nixon’s opponents. [7]

In 2016 a group of Russians, known as the Internet Research Agency, broke into the Democratic National Committee’s email system and into the Clinton campaign’s email system. They released this information to Wikileaks, who released it to the world in time for the start of the Democratic Convention. The information was damaging enough to cause the resignation of the DNC Chair, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and to spread discontent among supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders just when the party should have been uniting for the general election.

Interfering with the election and the count

Fraudulent election activity is certainly not new to American politics. In the era of big-city political machines it was not unusual to “vote the dead”—have someone go to the polls and vote using the identity of someone who had died. And over the years, candidates and parties have engaged in all sorts of voter fraud—from paying people to vote who had already voted or who were pretending to be someone else to reporting precinct totals with intentional “errors.”

In his first run for the United States Senate, Lyndon Johnson, who was later to become president, lost the Democratic primary (that was all you had to win to win Texas in those days) amidst reports of widespread voter fraud. And so, as the story goes, when Johnson got the chance to run again in 1948 against former Governor Coke Stevenson, he was determined to play the game as it was currently played in Texas. The race became humorously known as the “87 vote landslide.” That was Johnson’s margin, totally the result of a late-reporting precinct from the town of Alice, Texas. Apparently 202 Mexican-American voters, some deceased or absent from the county on election day lined up at the last minute to cast their votes for Johnson. The ballot box from precinct 13 has mysteriously disappeared and is still sought after. [8]

Every dirty trick that was possible before the internet is possible today. The biggest difference is that they are cheaper, faster and easier to hide.

Fast-forward to the internet age

Every dirty trick that was possible before the internet is possible today. The biggest difference is that they are cheaper, faster and easier to hide. As we saw in 2016, the Russians threw a lot of false information about Hillary Clinton to the voters. In addition to the aforementioned “pizzagate,” they told targeted voters (especially Bernie Sanders’ supporters) that Hillary had Parkinson’s disease, that she was involved in al-Qaida, that she had murdered political opponents, that she used a body double, that she had made a small fortune arming ISIS and that she gave the order to leave four men in Benghazi. [9]

Character assassination, no matter how far-fetched, has always found its way into political campaigns. In this century “deep-fakes,” the use of audio and video to make it seem as if a candidate is saying or doing something that they didn’t do, will make character assassination even more potent. Although the video making Speaker Nancy Pelosi look as if she were drunk was quickly revealed to be doctored, it had been viewed more than 2 million times by the time major news outlets were reporting it to be a fake. [10] Facebook refused to take it down in spite of admitting it was a fake. And as of this writing we still don’t know and probably won’t know who doctored the video.

Spreading information designed to confuse the voters, breaking and entering, and interfering with the transmission of election results were all invented long before computers were invented. But now, the low cost of a dirty trick, the difficulty of holding someone accountable and the sheer speed with which a character assassination or a misleading bit of information can travel, makes these threats to democracy more urgent than ever. In the essays that follow we will be exploring different aspects of the cyber threat to elections and options for protecting our democracy.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/05/us/prison-furloughs-in-massachusetts-threaten-dukakis-record-on-crime.html

[2] Going Dirty: The Art of Negative Campaigning, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) page 2.

[3] Given the near total preponderance of men in American electoral history there have been fewer allegations of lesbianism.

[4] See Chapter 6 in Election 2004: How Bush Cheney ’04 won and what you can expect in the future, by Evan Thomas and the Staff of Newsweek. (Public Affairs, 2004) for a description of the Kerry campaign’s inept response.

[5] http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/03/11/palmbeach.recount/

[6] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whats-in-a-name-in-politi_b_5265022   and https://www.boston.com/news/history/2017/05/17/meet-honey-fitz-the-pixielike-mayor-of-boston-and-jfks-grandfather

[7] Daniel Ellsberg was a critic of the Vietnam War who leaked “The Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times.  The “plumbers” broke into his psychiatrist’s office hoping to find evidence of drug use or of a sex scandal.

[8] https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/go-ask-alice/

[9] https://www.brookings.edu/research/malevolent-soft-power-ai-and-the-threat-to-democracy/

[10] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/23/faked-pelosi-videos-slowed-make-her-appear-drunk-spread-across-social-media/?utm_term=.fb015f49c3ae

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POLITICS IS A DIRTY GAME AND ANY PLAYER SHOULD BE READY FOR THE CONSEQUENCES

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The rise of dirty politics in Europe

A coming backlash to the green wave.

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T HE BOIS DE LA CAMBRE is the most handsome park in Brussels. Its 123 hectares offer mature forest and potential peace for the residents of the Belgian capital’s well-to-do southern suburbs. Naturally, the Belgians—among Europe’s biggest petrolheads—built a motorway through it. During the lockdown, the park was closed to traffic. Pedestrians were delighted. Drivers were furious, court cases came and a new front in the culture war was born.

Grumpy motorists are easy to find in Europe today. Head north to the Netherlands and they moan about speed limits. There, motorway traffic now crawls along at 100kph (62mph) after the government cut the daytime speed limit from 130kph to stop the country busting through its pollution limits. Mark Rutte, the country’s ever-flexible prime minister, declared the measure he had just introduced “rotten”. Over the border in Germany, the days of screaming down the autobahn at 200kph could be over, if the Greens end up in government and introduce a speed limit. Green politicians know it will cause a fight. “The speed limit is second amendment stuff,” says Daniel Freund, a Green MEP .

Car wars belie Europe’s reputation for eco-friendliness. Green parties are riding high in the polls and could return to power in Germany this year. Climate-denier cranks have been routed. Those who believe man has nothing to do with global warming are bracketed with folk who think the Moon landing was fake and Elvis is alive. Ambitious targets are set, and then made more stringent, as the EU positions itself as the class swot of environmentalism. A few years ago, reducing emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 was deemed enough. Now the demand is 55%. All EU countries have signed up to it, after persuasion and copious bribes via EU funding.

What must be done has been agreed on. The fight over how to do it is just beginning. Support for climate measures is broad but shallow, says Heather Grabbe of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, which polled eight European countries. Nearly all voters are happy to buy less plastic, though far fewer are keen to pay more for fuel or flights. And good intentions mask complacency. In each country a majority of voters expect life to continue broadly as normal, even if nothing is done by 2035. The size of the likely shift over the coming decades has not sunk in. Hard choices are yet to be made or a political price paid.

Already certain politicians of the right are jostling to provide voters with an easy way out. Policy platforms promising frequent flights, cheap petrol and a guilt-free carnivorous diet are appearing across fringe parties. Ahead of Dutch elections in March, the far-right Party for Freedom ( PVV ) promises to raise speed limits to 140kph. Populists have found their previous bread-and-butter issue, immigration, sinking from public consciousness as borders have been more or less closed. So now the likes of the Sweden Democrats, an anti-immigration party, and the similar Alternative for Germany are increasingly focusing on the environment. Most stop short of outright global-warming denial. Instead, they argue that too much is being done, too quickly, at too high a cost. “Nobody is against a green environment,” declares the PVV in its manifesto. Instead it opposes “pointless, unaffordable climate policy”. The PVV and its ilk are unlikely to get anywhere near office. Such parties achieve their aims, however, not by winning power but by dragging mainstream parties towards their positions. That is what happened with migration.

This makes it politically more dangerous for politicians to go green than at first glance. Get it wrong and punishment is swift. France provided an example of what not to do when, in 2018, it cut speed limits on country roads and raised taxes on fuel. The result was the gilets jaunes movement, which snowballed from a crowd of grumpy drivers into protesters waving mock guillotines in Paris. In Germany the Greens learned in 2013 that proposing to ban some things and charge more for others was not popular. In the land of sausage-munching drivers of gas-guzzling cars, the party proposed higher taxes on fuel and meat-free days in the cafeteria. Support plunged and the Greens are still trying to shrug off a reputation for being the party of prohibition.

Foot-dragging is already a problem, even before a proper backlash has begun. Germany agreed to phase out coal only by 2038, after dawdling from both the centre-left Social Democrats and the Christian Democratic Union, their centre-right coalition partners. The new CDU leader, Armin Laschet, is among the coal industry’s strongest supporters. The temptation to go even slower may grow as parties on the extremes offer voters an easy alternative. Pushing through environmental reforms in the wake of a catastrophic slump makes life even harder. Suppose the recovery is botched. Even if the real cause is miserly fiscal policy, voters may blame greenery for their woes. That could make reform harder to sustain.

Avoiding a car crash

When it comes to the environment, there will be losers. This is by design. Some behaviour—whether taking a third flight in a year, or zipping through a park in a Mercedes—must become inconvenient or expensive compared with greener options, because technology will not solve the problem fast enough. Some jobs will go. Politicians argue hopefully that if carbon taxes go up, then other taxes can go down; dirty jobs can be replaced by clean ones. But voters may feel they have heard all this before. A similar argument was put forward about globalisation. For years, voters were assured that it did not matter if jobs went abroad as new ones would replace them at home. The proceeds of extra growth would be shared. But the hoped-for redistribution disappointed. Some jobs were not replaced; some areas were left to rot. Politics went to pot. Voters are expected to accept this logic a second time and trust that governments will not betray them. If Europe’s leaders flunk it again, the consequences could be ugly. ■

For more coverage of climate change, register for The Climate Issue, our fortnightly newsletter , or visit our climate-change hub

This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Dirty politics”

Europe February 18th 2021

• Mario Draghi begins the toughest job in European politics
• Catalonia’s separatists score another victory, but a hollow one
• Why Corsican number plates are popular

From the February 18th 2021 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

More from Europe

Ukraine’s war has created millions of broken families

Children and wives have been apart from their fathers and husbands for more than two years

A crushing blow for Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance

A big turnout for Le Pen’s hard right makes clear the president’s gamble backfired spectacularly

France heads to the polls in a critical parliamentary vote

Marine Le Pen’s hard-right party is expecting a massive surge

Emmanuel Macron’s centrists are facing a disastrous first-round vote

Marine Le Pen’s party will be the main beneficiary

European gangs are getting better at making their own illegal drugs

The faster the police crack down, the faster they adapt to new methods

Finland’s shrinking high schools are importing pupils from abroad

And educating them at taxpayers’ expense

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Philippine Politics Become Even More Dangerous

Since the election, last spring, of President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines has witnessed the effects of increasingly demagogic politics on its culture and institutions. While Duterte has won praise domestically and internationally for some of his efforts, including plans to resolve the southern insurgency and strategies to reduce economic inequality in the Philippines, he also has increasingly personalized politics, while dramatically undermining the rule of law. Campaigning as a demagogue, he has often governed as a demagogue, brooking little opposition and overseeing bloody policies. His war on drugs, which has descended into a bloody killing spree with few seeming constraints on the power of the security forces, is but one example of how the rule of law has deteriorated in a few months. [The New York Times has a compelling and graphic new look inside the antidrug campaign here .]. Duterte also has threatened journalists and other members of civil society, while embarking upon a foreign policy that has bewildered many Philippine security experts. The president’s mercurial style, although popular with many Philippine citizens so far, has often made it difficult to know what policy initiative---in both domestic and foreign policy---to take seriously, and which to ignore.

The country’s politics, always noisy and vibrant, have become especially dangerous, and currents of opposition to Duterte appear to be forming. After Duterte’s administration approved the burial of the body of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in a hero’s cemetery, with little warning, anti-Duterte protests have swelled in Manila. (Although Duterte comes from a left-leaning background, he has long expressed warm feelings for the Marcos family, and Duterte’s father served in the former dictator’s cabinet.) The protests, which began as Philippine citizens realized Marcos was going to be interred, quickly spread from Manila to other parts of the country, and included not just older Filipinos who remembered the Marcos era but some younger men and women who objected to the burial, and who used the demonstrations to voice anger at some of Duterte’s dictatorial approaches to politics.

Philippines

Rodrigo Duterte

Politics and Government

As Mong Palatino notes in The Diplomat , Duterte seems to have underestimated the strong lingering anger over the Marcos era and over giving Marcos any hero’s burial. The president also seems to have underestimated the possibility that anti-Marcos burial protests could become rallying points for supporters of the previous administration, and opposition parties, to air grievances about Duterte’s policies and approach to governing. Duterte’s administration, meanwhile, has repeatedly responded to the demonstrations by calling the protesters agitators who are seeking to foment violence.

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Now, just after the burial demonstrations, a new crisis has emerged. In the Philippines, the vice president and the president are elected separately, and so the country often winds up with a vice president and president from different parties---indeed, two political figures who are major rivals and who clash, rhetorically, for the president’s whole term. This is the current situation; in the same election in which Duterte was elected president, Leni Robredo, a respected human rights lawyer and former mayor from a different party as Duterte, was elected vice-president.

Predictably, Robredo and Duterte, who is not known for his interest in human rights norms, have clashed from the first day of his administration. While she was given a Cabinet position in addition to her vice presidency---she was working as a housing secretary in the Cabinet---Robredo claims she was essentially frozen out at Cabinet meetings and her agency was ignored. Earlier this month, she quit her position as housing secretary, while retaining her post as vice president. She told reporters she had sent Duterte a letter saying “remaining in your cabinet has become untenable.” More worryingly, she publicly insinuated that the administration had been maneuvering to remove her from the vice presidency, possibly to replace her with Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the son of the former dictator and a close ally of Duterte’s. According to Bloomberg , she warned of a “plot to steal” the vice presidency from her.

There are several dangers from Robredo and Duterte becoming more publicly alienated from each other. Duterte could maneuver more aggressively to replace Robredo, though the constitutionality of such a move would prove challenging. Still, if he succeeded he might trigger much larger protests, since Robredo is nearly as popular as the president. The second, also worrying implication, is that Robredo could increasingly be seen, by many Filipinos who oppose Duterte’s brutal style of governing, as a viable alternative leader---especially if Duterte continues to abuse the rule of law. Although Duterte’s actions are dangerous, corrosive to the rule of law, and potentially dislocating to the Philippines’ safety and security, if his opponents want to challenge him they should do so in the legislature and the courts and the media. Doing so in these ways would push back against the president’s reported abuses while reinforcing the rule of law. But too often in the past, Philippine leaders have been forced from power in murky, sometimes extralegal ways---and having a vice president beloved by Duterte’s opponents exacerbate the risk of some kind of extralegal challenge to the presidency.

One does not have to look too far back for an example of a controversial, even dangerous president being removed through questionable means---with his vice president ready to take over and possibly playing a role in his ouster. In fact, this is roughly what happened to former president (and now mayor of Manila) Joseph Estrada in 2001. He was replaced by his vice president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Estrada was no role model. His removal certainly rid the Philippines of a president who did little to promote the rule of law---after stepping down following massive street protests, an impeachment, and the withdrawal of army support for him, Estrada was later convicted of graft. In office, he had weathered massive allegations of graft and widespread complaints from advisors and foes alike that he was uninterested in public policy. But Estrada’s removal, a combination of a legal process, street protests, and a kind of coup, did little to strengthen Philippine institutions or set any precedent for how to address illegal activities by a president.

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Dirty Politics

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Jamieson exposes the methods and meaning of today’s attack campaigns, exploring the subtle and devious techniques of recent political ads. and suggesting ways in which the impact of deception can be minimised. Highlighting controversial tactics such as the 1988 Willie Horton ad., Jamieson argues that debates about “negative campaigning” are fundamentally misdirected. Attacking opponents’ weaknesses is a legitimate part of political discourse, and barefaced lies have a long tradition in American politicking. New is the surge of powerful ads that invite false inferences about the facts or that covertly pander to prejudice, evoking anti-black, anti-feminist, and anti-gay responses. At the same time, modern media coverage is reinforcing instead of undercutting campaign deception, while PAC-sponsored ads eliminate the candidates’ accountability for their attacks. Building on Jamieson’s compelling studies of political advertising, speechmaking, and debates, this book will be a timely companion to the 1992 elections, helping to make sense of the debates over what’s fair and what’s foul in today’s political campaigns.

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Politics Is A Dirty Game (Essay/Paper Sample)

Table of Contents

Politics Is a Dirty Game

When we think of politics, we normally think about political propaganda and strategies on how politicians get people to vote for them. What we don’t usually see is the espionage going on behind the scenes. Remember that politics isn’t quite as selfless as the media and the politicians themselves have you believe. Sabotage, spying, and bribery among others are what push a politician into a seat of dangerous power.

Let’s take, for example, Richard Nixon. According to A. Smith from listverse.com:

“Nixon hired former CIA agents in order to fix classified document leaks at first. They then became known as the White House Plumbers. When the 1972 elections neared, the Plumbers began sabotaging Nixon’s political opponents. This led to the infamous “Watergate Scandal”, five of the Plumbers got caught stealing from the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters located at the Watergate office complex. This started investigations about the link of the Watergate burglars to the White House Plumbers (also known as Nixon’s Reelection Committee. The White House then resorted to lying and paying off certain people in order to stay safe. This eventually led to the downfall of Robert Nixon.”

A more recent example would be the 2016 presidential elections. Stakes were running quite high during this specific election period. As such, Republicans tried to ensure that Donald Trump won. According to D. Victor of The New York Times, “Images went around the internet falsely claiming that residents of Pennsylvania can vote online through Twitter. This and another ploy targeted the Democrats.

While malicious images have been circling the internet, more grave acts have been committed in real life. At the Republican Party Headquarters in North Carolina’s Orange County, a firebomb along with a spray-painted swastika on the outside of the building was found in October 2016. The firebomb rendered the office completely useless. A message accompanied the swastika that read, “Nazi Republicans leave town or else”.

Of course, along with politics come the social issues of the time. According to A. Love and W. Bergstrom of politico.com, “In the 1977 New York City mayoral primary, Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo ran against each other. Propaganda on Cuomo’s side read, “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo”. Ultimately, Ed Koch won.

Discrimination against minority groups went further back, however. In 1836, Davy Crockett wrote that presidential candidate Martin Van Buren was more like a woman than a woman. Degrading the opposing candidate has been a practice that exists until today.

Not every trick has to target the opposing party. Sometimes, politicians use tricks to get the people’s hearts. Take for example the death of Kate Steinle. According to K. Benjamin of cracked.com:

“In 2015, she was shot and killed by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco. Politicians like Donald Trump has used Kate’s death to try to convince people that every undocumented immigrant is a rapist and a killer. Kate’s brother went on CNN and told Anderson Cooper, “Donald Trump talks about her (Kate) like he knows her. I’ve never heard a word from his campaign manager, I’ve never heard a word from him. “

In a world such as ours, we should be able to think for ourselves and not be swayed by such propaganda. A politician is just a person that just so happens to have the necessary means to change a city, state, or country, and as such, a person can commit wrongdoing. You may never know if your environment-loving, “selfless”, and all-around “good” candidate is actually a liar, a cheater, and a thief.

• Smith, A.T. (2014, January 18). 10 Worst Dirty Tricks in American Politics. Retrieved from https://listverse.com
• Victor, D. (2016, November 4 . Dirty Tricks, Vandalism, and the Dark Side of Politics . Retrieved from https://nytimes.com
• Love, A. and Bergstrom, W. (2012, June 6). 16 Worst Political Dirty Tricks . Retrieved from https://politico.com
• Benjamin, K. (2016, July 23). The 7 Dirtiest Tricks Politicians Use to Make You Like Them . Retrieved from https://cracked.com

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Tragedy of Julius Caesar — An Analysis of Politics in Julius Caesar, a Play by William Shakespeare

An Analysis of Politics in Julius Caesar, a Play by William Shakespeare

• Categories: The Tragedy of Julius Caesar William Shakespeare

About this sample

Words: 1598 |

Published: Sep 12, 2018

Words: 1598 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Table of contents

Julius caesar outline essay, julius caesar essay example, introduction.

• Introduction to the role of human character in politics as depicted in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

Character Determining Choices

• Discussion of how characters in the play make choices that reveal their morality and personal benefit
• Focus on examples like Brutus and Antony making choices that benefit Rome or themselves

Complexity of Political Decisions

• Explanation of how the play portrays political decisions as complex, not simply right or wrong
• Highlighting the uncertainty and unpredictability of politics

Impact of Character on Political Decisions

• Analysis of how the characters' moral values and traits influence their political actions
• Exploration of Brutus and Antony as examples of how character shapes political choices
• Recap of the role of character in politics as demonstrated in Julius Caesar
• Emphasis on the idea that a leader's character strongly influences their political decisions

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10 Lines on Dirty Politics in English

Dirty politics involves dishonest tactics like spreading false information, bribery, and manipulating the media. These actions undermine trust in government, create division, and damage the foundations of democracy, making it difficult for honest leaders to succeed and for societies to progress.

Here, we’ve presented multiple samples of 10 lines on “Dirty Politics”. All the samples will be helpful for students of all classes i.e. Nursery, LKG, UKG, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 & class 12.

Table of Contents

10 Lines on Dirty Politics: Sample 1

• Dirty politics harms society and creates mistrust.
• Politicians often use lies to gain power.
• Bribery is a common tactic in dirty politics.
• False promises mislead the public.
• Manipulating media is another dirty trick.
• Some politicians smear their opponents.
• Voters feel confused by dirty politics.
• It can lead to unfair elections.
• Dirty politics damages democracy.
• People lose faith in their leaders.

Dirty Politics 10 Lines: Sample 2

• Dirty politics creates division among people.
• Leaders use false accusations to discredit opponents.
• Corruption is widespread in dirty politics.
• Politicians often break promises to gain votes.
• Media can be manipulated to spread false news.
• Bribes are given to secure political support.
• Voters are often misled by deceptive campaigns.
• Dirty politics leads to unfair competition.
• Trust in the political system decreases.
• Democracy suffers when politicians act dishonestly.

10 Lines About Dirty Politics: Sample 3

• Dirty politics often involves spreading rumors and lies about opponents.
• Politicians might use their power to intimidate others and stay in control.
• Corruption, which includes taking bribes, undermines public trust in leaders.
• Some leaders make false promises, knowing they will not keep them.
• Manipulating the media and spreading fake news is a common tactic in dirty politics.
• Voters are often deceived by flashy campaigns that hide the truth.
• Dirty politics can lead to rigged elections, which are not truly democratic.
• When politicians smear each other, it creates a toxic environment.
• People lose faith in the system when they see corruption and lies.
• A healthy democracy cannot thrive when dirty politics is the norm.

5 Lines on Dirty Politics

• Dirty politics involves spreading false information about opponents.
• Politicians sometimes use their power to intimidate others unfairly.
• Corruption, including bribery, damages public trust.
• Media manipulation is a common tactic to mislead voters.
• Dirty politics weakens the foundation of democracy.

20 Lines on Dirty Politics

• Dirty politics often includes spreading false rumors about opponents to damage their reputation.
• Politicians sometimes use their influence to intimidate and silence critics.
• Corruption, such as accepting bribes, undermines public trust and transparency.
• Some leaders make grand promises they have no intention of keeping to gain votes.
• Manipulating the media and spreading fake news are common tactics in dirty politics.
• This manipulation can mislead voters and skew public perception.
• Dirty politics often involves rigging elections to ensure a desired outcome.
• This practice undermines the very principles of democracy.
• Politicians might use smear campaigns to create a negative image of their rivals.
• These smear campaigns can include personal attacks and baseless accusations.
• Voters are often confused and disillusioned by the constant negativity.
• This environment makes it difficult for honest candidates to succeed.
• Dirty politics can lead to voter apathy, where people feel their vote doesn’t matter.
• The use of dirty tactics can also create deep divisions within society.
• When politicians act dishonestly, it erodes public trust in government institutions.
• Internationally, dirty politics can affect a country’s reputation and relations.
• Transparency and accountability are often the first casualties in dirty politics.
• Efforts to clean up politics are hindered by those who benefit from the status quo.
• Whistleblowers who expose dirty politics often face severe repercussions.
• A society plagued by dirty politics struggles to progress and maintain a healthy democracy.

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Y-Speak: Dirty elections by the Filipinos, for the Filipinos

ONLY one word comes to mind when Philippine elections is mentioned: dirty.

It has long been a controversial event in Philippine politics. This is a time when cheating, corruption, and killings are widespread all over the country.

Ever since the start of elections for the first President of the Philippines, it has been a dirty self-serving political games played to win the most coveted prize of all—a seat in the Philippine political office.

The Filipinos blame the aspiring politicians, with their Michiavellan games, their Sun Tzu power plays. Often overlooked is the contribution that the media has, the COMELEC has, and even the Filipino people themselves.

The Greedy Politicians

Emilio Aguinaldo, dubbed as the first Filipino traitor, was always speculated to kill his presidential rivals. Rumors had it, that he did nothing when Andres Bonifacio and General Luna was killed because they were his rivals in obtaining the presidency.

This controversy was very much refreshed in the Filipino minds when the movie General Luna was opened to the public.

Here the obvious problem is in fact a candidate’s thirst for power wherein they are willing to commit the mortal sin of murder to abolish any rivals that could beat them in elections.

Another example is the 1949 dirty elections by Elpidio Quirino wherein he was accused by Carlos P. Romulo and Marvin M. Gray in their book The Magsaysay Story (1956) of intimidating his opponents by the use of military force.

Perhaps the most popular exhibition of dirty politics in the Philippines is the infamous Marcos scandals.

Benigno Aquino was a forerunner of winning the elections against Marcos in 1973 but Ferdinand Marcos cancelled the elections.

We fastforward to the “snap” elections of Marcos and Cory Aquino wherein Marcos attempted to cheat his way into winning back the votes he lost in his presidential run.

Here we see again the greed of politicians taking over the democracy that the Filipinos expected when they were set free from colonizers.

These are the greed of politicians at work.

The Irresponsible Media

Next, let us see how the media takes a role in the dirty elections as well.

In 1992, Miriam Santiago sought to become the second woman president of the Philippines. The votes were very close and she could have won the presidency. However, here we see the media, perhaps hired by other politicians or perhaps not, set out to destroy the senator and turn off her supporters. Santiago’s mental health was questioned.

In an article written by Philip Shenon in May 10, 1992 in The New York Times, he says that “Mrs. Santiago's opponents are well aware of her popularity, and she has become the target of a well-orchestrated rumor campaign, abetted by some of leading Manila's newspapers. There have been suggestions that she is mentally unbalanced and that she suffered a nervous breakdown a decade ago.”

This was the time that Miriam was dubbed as “Brenda” meaning “brain damage” by the media circulating rumors that she was not quite right at the head.

Fidel V. Ramos won the presidential race in 1992.

Although it is the media’s role to inform the citizens of the wrongdoings of the candidates who are seeking office, one has to question their loyalty to the Filipino people.

They are bought. They are paid to write and air news about political candidates to ruin their reputations.

Instead of helping the people become wise decision-makers, they are making fools of their fellow Filipinos by feeding them false information in exchange for a brown envelope.

They just become propagandists.

The “trustworthy” Comelec

Of course let us not forget the Comelec.

The scandal of Comelec that shook the whole nation was when Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ran for president against actor Fernando Poe Jr.

Nobody has forgotten the “Hello Garci” scandal. The alleged recordings of Arroyo asking Comelec Commissioner Virgilio Garcilliano if she will still lead by 1 million.

This is an act of electoral fraud by Garcilliano. One can wonder just how many other Comelec officials are in cahoots with politicans.

In the more recent Comelec scandal, a whistleblower said that Jejomar Binay allegedly bought 7 million votes for 20 pesos each which amounted to more than 1 billion pesos in the 2010 elections. This vote-buying, if true, may have been the reason why he won as Vice President last 2010.

The country cannot assure a fair voting if the Comelec itself is biased.

The stupid, perhaps uneducated Filipino people.

One stakeholder is often overlooked when we talk about dirty elections—the Filipinos themselves. Often we hear of vote-buying by politicians, but we do not hear much of the Filipinos who can be bought by money or goods.

These are citizens who are willing to give up their right to vote and their right to democracy in exchange for a few hundred pesos and a week’s worth of food.

Filipinos are also quite lazy when it comes to voting. According to Comelec, they are expecting three-fourths of the registered voters to vote in the upcoming elections in 2016.

One fourth of the country is not voting and their votes could be game changers.

Another reason why Filipinos are also to blame is because of their blind predilection for celebrities turned politicians.

Perhaps we can call this corruption of the mind. Celebrities are often favored by the Filipinos.

A good example of this is former President Erap Estrada. Estrada whose famous tagline is “Walang kaibi-kaibigan at walang kamag-anak-kamag-anak” gained country-wide popularity as an actor who starred in many feature films. He used his popularity as a means to gain a seat in office.

The Filipinos are all too pleased with his decision to become a politician, supporting him and voting for him until he eventually became President of the Philippines.

There are many actors who ran for office and won because of their work as an actor. Examples of these are Lucy Torres-Gomez, Bong Revilla Jr., and Vilma Santos.

Another well-known name outside politics, a quintesstial celebrity turned politician, shows just how blind Filipinos are when it comes to voting for candidates that are actually qualified for office—Manny Pacquiao.

Pacquiao became congressman by a landslide of votes even beating old names for a seat at the House of Representatives. The best thing about this is, he rarely even shows up for work.

Dirty elections

With all this, it seems as if the elections and politics in the Philippines will never improve.

Dirty elections by the Filipinos, for the Filipinos.

Take the scandals and media coverage each presidential candidates are facing right now: the American Poe, a daughter of the beloved actor FPJ, the corrupt Binay, facing charges of corruption everywhere, the incompetent Mar Roxas, who performed less than satisfactory in managing the victims of typhoons, and the ‘Punisher’ Rodrigo Duterte, who is attacked by human rights accusations.

We see the role of the candidates themselves in turning this election dirty—Roxas and Duterte arguing like children on national tv. We see the role of media who loves to expose charges and accusations and sensationalized news about the candidates. We see the role of COMELEC who promises to have a fair voting for 2016. We see the role of Filipinos, their passion (or lack thereof) in Philippine politics. Everything is in chaos and it seems like history will once again repeat itself.

Still, a political analyst of The Manila Times, Yen Makabenta, remains optimistic about the upcoming 2016 elections. He writes about how 2016 may be a game changer in Philippine politics. His byline says it all: Elections 2016: A chance for change.

In his article, he says that “Millennials are beginning to demand better (they are interested in solutions for present problems, and future plans, not to be stuck in the past)”.

He presents the youth as possible game changers saying “Tomorrow’s world will not be built by yesterday’s men who helped tear down the fabric of Philippine democracy, and weakened the political institutions.”

Another expert, Manuel L. Quezon III of Philippine Daily Inquirer, analyzes the 2016 elections in his “The Great Referendum: The national election of 2016”.

He emphasizes the importance of media in this elections: “Here media and academe can make a difference, just as committed bloggers and others can, too. There is also a perceptible demand for debates between the candidates.”

He also says that the Presidential candidates are giving the Filipinos four options of a possible government which has never quite happened before: continuity for populism, Binay, who is a traditional politician, experimentation for populism, Duterte, for his plans of federalism, experimentation for reform and populism, Poe, and of course, continuity and reform, Roxas who will continue what politicians before him did.

Quezon remarks that the elections this 2016 will be quite different from the past, calling it The Great Referendum. It will probably be the first and last of its kind.

He ends the article with the words “You will be the judge”, referring to Filipinos and how in the end, it will be them who will ultimately decide the outcome of the 2016 elections. Only one word comes to mind when Philippine elections is mentioned: dirty.

In the end it is self-interest that makes politicians, the media, Comelec, and Filipinos to act dirty.

But will 2016 finally change this?

Analysts hope that this will end the long controversial elections held in the Philippines.

If the predictions of political experts are indeed true and this elections will become a game changer for Philippine politics, one thing is for sure: the politicians, the media, Comelec, and the Filipinos all have a role to play and it is with great hope that they play it just and right. (Isabel Victoria Sanchez)

Isabel Victoria is a student of Ateneo de Davao University.

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Dirty Virtue

• Published: 04 September 2023
• Volume 27 , pages 515–537, ( 2023 )

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• Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5589-8095 1  

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Michael Walzer’s foundational essay on dirty hands raises the very possibility of a good person in politics. Dilemmas in the context of high stakes situations sometimes require politicians to compromise their morality and character for the sake of the greater good by choosing the lesser evil. Much has been written about dirty hands, but little has been said about Walzer’s implicit virtue ethics. This essay sketches this implicit virtue ethics, which is central to Walzer’s argument. These are “dirty” virtues, however, that allow one to choose the lesser evil in a dilemma while recognizing that, although evil was mitigated, and some degree of good achieved, wrong done is still wrong done. For this to work, Walzer argues the politician must be and feel guilty, making this an odd virtue ethics that requires a degree of suffering from the politician. The essay further develops this notion of dirty virtue through comparison with Lisa Tessman’s “burdened virtue,” arguing at the end that the guilt and instrumental suffering, which are so central to Walzer’s virtue ethic, may be more corrosive to practical reasoning and character than Walzer allows for.

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Machiavellian Variations, or When Moral Convictions and Political Duties Collide

What’s wrong with virtue signaling, antigone in hertfordshire: moral conflict and moral pluralism in forster’s howards end.

Tillyris has looked at virtue in his analysis of the dirty hands problem. He is referring, however, to the actions involved in politics that persons outside of politics would see as vicious, such as the “cruelty” required in torture in the ticking time bomb scenario ( 2015 : 69). This essay, however, is interested in spelling out the virtues and vices that Walzer uses to articulate the kind of character he thinks is necessary for a good politician. Stocker also argues that Aristotle’s virtue ethic allows for dirty hands, which has been informative to this work, but Stocker is less concerned with fleshing out the relevant virtue ethic than in examining the relevance of mixed actions to dirty hands ( 1986 ). The vices investigated in this paper, however, are more idiosyncratic to Walzer, who is concerned about what kind of character it takes to be a politician who must dirty their hands and yet somehow not be corrupted by his experience and decisions. In this way he is providing a character sketch of the good politician plunged into less than ideal situations.

There is another, similar discourse in moral philosophy: “morally admirable immorality.” Troy Jollimore, for example, argues for admirable immorality through a utilitarian account. It would take much more space than is at hand to compare Walzer’s accout to Jollimore’s, particularly as Walzer is very critical of utilitarian approaches. Such a utilitarian account, however, misses the important, and I would say critical, phenomenological aspect to these discussions that Walzer hopes to capture. The issue is not just a violation of a principle of morality or of utility in particular. It is, instead, how such choices affect the very architecture of one’s identity and moral subjectivity, which in turn affects one’s ability to think, imagine, and act in the future. See Jollimore ( 2006 ).

This can also be seen in Christian ethics, as well as Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian approaches, as well as Buddhist ethical concepts such as paramitas or brahma viharas , which can be argued are philosophical cognates approximating the concept of virtue.

Nussbaum provides a good overview of different approaches to this and related questions in Fragility of Goodness . Note particularly the preface to the new edition ( 2000a ).

Not all agree with framing the problem of dirty hands as a dilemma. For example, see Nielsen ( 2007 ).

I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer who suggested I engage with Galston’s article more fully in the text of this essay.

I use morally and spiritual here to get at the broader sense of morality found in such writers as Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor.

One can begin to see a different way to evaluate Galston’s virtue ethics of toughness. Will toughness over the long term wear on one like a burdened virtue? What costs might “toughness” exact? It is an important question worthy of further investigation.

These reflect different value spheres found in Walzer ( 1983 ).

Although there is not the space here, it would be interesting to compare this to a “pluralistic view” of virtue ethics (Swanton 2005 ), as well as Wolf ( 1982 ).

Tessman does recognize that some may struggle nonviolently and so perhaps may not need burdened virtue. This is only seen as a choice, however, if one thinks that all liberative struggles can be nonviolent, and Tessman clearly indicates she does not think this is so ( 2005a : 81).

This understanding is a significant contribution from Uppsala University’s Engaging Vulnerabilities project. See for example, Keshavarz and Shahram ( 2022 ).

I am indebted to Christina Nick for the formulation of this paragraph.

I rely here on James Gilligan’s account of guilt and shame, which he helpfully distinguishes not so much by their contents, or whether they are inwardly or outwardly directed, as by the way they are repaired ( 2003 ).

A good example is Boudreau ( 2011 ). For moral injury as transformation, see Wiinikka-Lydon ( 2018 ) and ( 2019 ).

Time and space forbid me from discussion martyrdom (for martyrdom’s sake) as a form of political vice, but Walzer’s essay, so generative to the thought of many, raises this as an additional dirty vice.

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Wiinikka-Lydon, J. Dirty Virtue. J Ethics 27 , 515–537 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09453-6

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Readers Don’t Trust Dirty Tricks

What worked for British tabloids won’t work for The Washington Post .

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

In March of 2002, Milly Dowler, age 13, left her home in Walton-on-Thames for the last time. After she disappeared, her parents called the police. A search began. Blanket news coverage followed. In those days, probably a dozen British tabloids and half a dozen higher-brow broadsheets all chased the same stories. In an effort to beat his newspaper’s rivals, an investigator employed by News of the World , one of those tabloids, hacked into Dowler’s cellphone. He was looking for messages that offered clues; he may or may not have deleted some messages, thereby giving her family false hope that she might be alive.

A few months later, Dowler’s body was found. Several years after that, British police uncovered evidence of the phone hack, along with evidence that the phones of many other people—actors, athletes, Prince Harry—had been hacked by News of the World journalists in pursuit of other stories. The nation recoiled in horror: What kind of monster would hack the phone of a missing child? The Dowlers, along with a whole raft of celebrities, sued News of the World and its parent company, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch shut down the paper and, over many years, paid out millions of pounds in damages. Prince Harry’s suit is still in the courts.

I am telling this story because it forms part of the background to another story, this one about The Washington Post , where I once worked, first as an editorial writer and then as a columnist. But before I get to that, I want to point out that the British phone-hacking scandal was unique in only one sense: There were negative consequences for the newspaper and its owner. More often, there weren’t.

On the contrary, phone hacking, phone bugging, blackmail, police bribery, and large payments to sources had been accepted in some corners of the British media for a long time. In the very happy decade I spent as a British journalist—at The Spectator , at the Evening Standard , and as a columnist at The Sunday Telegraph , before I got to the Post —I worked with many great editors and excellent journalists, and witnessed a lot of hand-wringing about whether intrusive tabloid journalism was good for the country. But nobody could argue with the logic of profit. When The Sun acquired a tape of Princess Diana speaking to James Gilbey, presumed to be her lover, or when the Mirror decided to publish a transcript of then-Prince Charles talking to his then-mistress, they did so because that would sell newspapers.

There were broadsheet versions of this too. In 2009, Robert Winnett, then a reporter at the Telegraph , together with the newspaper’s top editor, Will Lewis— paid some $120,000 to an investigator who had got hold of stolen data showing that British members of Parliament were cheating on their expenses. Winnett and Lewis were richly rewarded: A scandal ensued, several MPs resigned, and the Telegraph sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The fierce competitiveness of the British-tabloid market produced a different way of writing about the news. Long before social media, the British tabloids experimented with the use of anger, emotion, partisanship, and polarization to capture and hold public attention. Sometimes they created celebrity scandals. Sometimes they attacked migrants or foreigners. Sometimes they deployed brilliant writers and reporters, which is why Britain has so many of those too. Along the way, they invented the modern language of populism, long before the word became part of our everyday lexicon. Any celebrity, any politician, any institution—the European Union, the British judiciary, the Royal Family—was fair game.

The drive to win readers by whatever means possible eventually blurred the distinction between tabloids and broadsheets, especially within the ecosystem of what is sometimes known as the Tory press: Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, the Telegraph Media Group, the Daily Mail . The broadsheets are always looking for the best editors and the cleverest journalists, and often hire them from the tabloids. Broadsheet journalists are frequently persuaded to write for the tabloids too; I’ve done so many times myself. Along the way, the distinction between the Tory press and the Tory party became blurred, as journalists, including former Prime Minister and Telegraph columnist Boris Johnson, moved back and forth between them (a pattern that happens on the left wing of British politics too). Finally, competition created a certain brutality, and not only toward politicians and celebrities. It was, and maybe still is, normal for new editors to fire large numbers of journalists on arrival. “Drowning kittens,” one proprietor called it. He meant that as a compliment.

Read: Revenge of the Brits

Will Lewis, whom Jeff Bezos hired to be the publisher of The Washington Post earlier this year, emerged from that hypercompetitive, scoop-driven world, and is in fact one of its great success stories. He started his career at The Mail on Sunday before moving to the Financial Times , where he broke quite a few stories, and then to the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times . He became the editor of the Telegraph , as noted, and then the CEO of Dow Jones and the publisher of The Wall Street Journal , also owned by Murdoch. I have never met him. By all accounts, he is affable, charming, and very talented.

He also lives by the rules of the world he made his career in. His name was recently mentioned in a court case connected to that long-ago phone-hacking scandal—the story that just won’t go away—and he is alleged to have offered an NPR reporter an exclusive interview in exchange for not writing about it. That might not have bothered anyone in London, but, like the practice of paying sources, it is unusual at The Washington Post . Lewis fell out, abruptly, with The Washington Post ’s now former executive editor, perhaps in part because he also asked her not to publish about it.

Lewis chose to replace her with Winnett, the man who broke his most important story. His logic was surely commercial: Winnett gets scoops, scoops get readers, and readers are what the newspaper needs. But The Washington Post also gets scoops, only it does so differently. My colleague Stephanie McCrummen, a former Washington Post reporter who helped break the story of Roy Moore—the U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama who had harassed teenage girls—wrote yesterday that her team never paid sources, and for very good reasons: “The reputation of the Post newsroom has been built upon readers’ trust that reporters do not pay sources, much less steal documents, hack computers, or engage in other deceptive news-gathering practices that have been associated with a certain kind of British journalism and the worst of American tabloid journalism.” McCrummen reckons that the Post ’s stories about Moore had so much power because people believed them. Moore lost his race.

Stephanie McCrummen: All The Washington Post has is its credibility

Nobody has said this very clearly, but the newsroom anxiety about both Winnett and Lewis might touch on the politics of their previous jobs as well as ethics and potential conflicts of interest. Lewis founded a public-relations agency that still bears his initials and through which, according to the Financial Times , he offered advice to Johnson and the Conservative Party, among others. Winnett has long worked at the Telegraph , a newspaper whose close alignment with the Conservative Party has never been in doubt. I don’t know whether he would have brought partisan headlines to The Washington Post , but I am guessing that some journalists feared he would. Whether or not they were correct, we will never know, because he is already gone.

Facing a newsroom revolt, Winnett on Friday resigned from the Post editorship. Back in London, some of his British colleagues rallied to his defense in an amusingly partisan manner. The Murdoch-owned Times wrote an article about Winnett that made a glancing reference to the money-for-data and other ethics stories that had roiled the Post newsroom, focusing instead on a claim that the “staff revolt” against Winnett had begun when he “pointed out errors in the newspaper’s coverage of the war in Gaza.” In The Sunday Times , Gerard Baker, a former editor of The Wall Street Journal , dismissed the “sanctimonious” Post reporters and called the newspaper “a reliable mouthpiece for left-wing, woke, progressive ideology”—language that could just as easily have been used by Sean Hannity.

But before this story becomes a full-blown culture-war meme—clever, brutal right-wing Brits versus mushy, woke left-wing Americans—it’s worth noting that this saga is unfolding just as the Conservative Party, which has long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Tory press, is imploding. This implosion is partly thanks to Brexit, a populist policy pushed by the Tory press, which if nothing else has made Britain poorer . Not all of those newspapers turned out to be good for the country, in other words—and not all of them are doing that well, either. Ownership of the Telegraph Group has been in limbo for months. Both The Sun and the Daily Mail , like just about every other form of media on the planet, are quickly losing circulation and advertising. Whatever tricks they once used to beat their competitors might not work for that much longer.

And no wonder: In Washington, in London, and everywhere else, we are drowning in unethically sourced information. The stuff that once shocked and scandalized us is now all over the internet, available for free. X, Facebook, Telegram, and YouTube have taken anger, emotion, and partisanship to levels no newspaper will ever match. AI-driven social-media campaigns will go even further. The tabloidization of everything is all around us already. That market is saturated. We don’t need The Washington Post ’s contribution as well.

I don’t have a formula for the future of newspapers and won’t presume to propose one. But if Lewis wants to build on The Washington Post ’s reputation, using its existing journalists, he will find a less crowded market if he builds a higher-quality, more reliable, and more trustworthy newspaper—and finds readers who will pay for it, for exactly that reason.

Book Bans Are on the Rise. But Fear of Fiction Is Nothing New.

Nearly 2,400 years ago, Plato worried that stories could corrupt susceptible minds. Moral panics over fiction have been common ever since.

For Plato, storytelling was a license for bad behavior. Credit... Ricardo Tomás; Photos, via Getty Images

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By Lyta Gold

Lyta Gold is an essayist and fiction writer, and the author of “Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality,” which will be published in October and from which this essay is adapted.

• July 1, 2024

The fear of fiction waxes and wanes, spiking every couple of decades like some kind of hysterical cicada. The current wave of book bans may be the worst since the 1980s, but we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and we’ll see it again.

The ’80s bans were driven by religious conservatives, dovetailing with the “ satanic panic ” over books and games involving magic, such as Dungeons & Dragons. Before that, in the 1950s, anxiety centered on trashy paperback novels and comics, which were said to cause “moral damage” and a “loss of ideals” in young people that would invariably lead to a life of crime. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the culprits were sexy Hollywood movies and modernist novels such as “Ulysses,” which — lest people engage in too much sex and modernism — resulted in the Hays Code and more book bans.

Earlier still, at the turn of the 20th century, people blamed America’s problems on dirty books and images that could be ordered through the mail. In the centuries before that, there were bouts of concern over penny dreadfuls, women’s novels, chivalric romances and comedic plays, going back through the ages to the fourth century B.C., when Plato declared in “The Republic” that all stories and other artistic “imitations” of reality — including poetry, music and painting — were unacceptable in an ideal society unless they could be proved to impart rational, wholesome values.

While the context changes, fear of fiction seems always to boil down to fear of one’s society and the people who live in it. Other people’s minds are frightening because they are inaccessible to us; one way we can know them is through their representations in fiction. We know that fiction affects us profoundly and mysteriously, and that other people are affected just as strongly and unpredictably as we are. Which means it’s at least theoretically possible that art could seduce our fellow citizens into wicked beliefs.

Moral panics over fiction are common in democracies, because the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.

Most histories of dangerous fiction begin with Plato, though anxiety about the pernicious effect of stories can be found in fragments of work by earlier Greek philosophers, who criticized the epic poetry of their day for portraying the gods as murderous, adulterous jerks. In “The Republic,” Plato expands on these early concerns: When people encounter stories about gods and heroes behaving badly, what stops them from imitating what they hear? When the poets sing about Achilles mourning Patroclus, won’t the audience think it’s OK to cry over dead loved ones, like a woman? When Achilles looks Agamemnon in the face and calls him a “winebibber, with the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer” — I mean, what if you said that to your dad? A cop? The president?

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